Historic Gridded Standardised Precipitation Index for the United Kingdom 1862-2015 (generated using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010)
5km gridded Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) data for Great Britain, which is a drought index based on the probability of precipitation for a given accumulation period as defined by McKee et al. [1]. SPI is calculated for different accumulation periods: 1, 3, 6, 12, 18, 24 months. Each of these is in turn calculated for each of the twelve calendar months. Note that values in monthly (and for longer accumulation periods also annual) time series of the data therefore are likely to be autocorrelated. The standard period which was used to fit the gamma distribution is 1961-2010. The dataset covers the period from 1862 to 2015. NOTE: the difference between this dataset with the previously published dataset 'Gridded Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPIgamma61-10]" (Tanguy et al., 2015 [2]), apart from the temporal and spatial extent, is the underlying rainfall data from which SPI was calculated. In the previously published dataset, CEH-GEAR (Keller et al., 2015 [3], Tanguy et al., 2014 [4]) was used, whereas in this version, Met Office 5km rainfall grids were used (see supporting information for more details). The methodology to calculate SPI is the same in the two datasets. [1] McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., Kleist, J. (1993). The Relationship of Drought Frequency and Duration to Time Scales. Eighth Conference on Applied Climatology, 17-22 January 1993, Anaheim, California. [2] Tanguy, M.; Hannaford, J.; Barker, L.; Svensson, C.; Kral, F.; Fry, M. (2015). Gridded Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPIgamma61-10]. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/94c9eaa3-a178-4de4-8905-dbfab03b69a0 [3] Keller, V. D. J., Tanguy, M., Prosdocimi, I., Terry, J. A., Hitt, O., Cole, S. J., Fry, M., Morris, D. G., and Dixon, H. (2015). CEH-GEAR: 1 km resolution daily and monthly areal rainfall estimates for the UK for hydrological use, Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., 8, 83-112, doi:10.5194/essdd-8-83-2015. [4] Tanguy, M.; Dixon, H.; Prosdocimi, I.; Morris, D. G.; Keller, V. D. J. (2014). Gridded estimates of daily and monthly areal rainfall for the United Kingdom (1890-2012) [CEH-GEAR]. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/5dc179dc-f692-49ba-9326-a6893a503f6e
dataset
http://eidc.ceh.ac.uk/metadata/ed7444fc-8c2a-473e-98cd-e68d3cffa2b0/zip_export/
name: Supporting information
description: Supporting information available to assist in re-use of this dataset
function: information
https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/ed7444fc-8c2a-473e-98cd-e68d3cffa2b0
doi:
eng
urn:ogc:def:crs:EPSG
27700
climatologyMeteorologyAtmosphere
Meteorological geographical features
publication
2008-06-01
Meteorological geographical features
Historic grids
rainfall extremes
drought indicator
SPI
Standard precipitation index
-8.648
1.768
60.861
49.864
1862-01-01
2015-12-31
publication
2017-03-16
notPlanned
SPI is calculated as originally defined in [1]. SPI is based on the cumulative probability of a given rainfall amount occurring at a location. The historic rainfall data of the station is fitted to a statistical distribution. For this dataset, the statistical distribution used is the gamma distribution, which has been extensively used and is recommended as a default choice for Europe by [2]. The L-moments method was used to estimate the gamma distribution parameters, as the maximum likehood method was failing to fit a realistic distribution in some isolated cases. To calculate SPI, the R package SCI was used [3], but modified to use L-moments (instead of Maximum Likelihood). The input data used is the monthly rainfall grids from the Met Office 5km gridded rainfall product. [1] McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., Kleist, J. (1993). The Relationship of Drought Frequency and Duration to Time Scales. Eighth Conference on Applied Climatology, 17-22 January 1993, Anaheim, California. [2] Stagge, J. H., Tallaksen, L. M., Gudmundsson, L., Van Loon, A. F. and Stahl, K. (2015), Candidate Distributions for Climatological Drought Indices (SPI and SPEI). Int. J. Climatol. doi: 10.1002/joc.4267 [3] Gudmundsson, L. & Stagge, J. H. (2014). Package 'SCI': Standardized Climate Indices such as SPI, SRI or SPEI. Repository CRAN, http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SCI/SCI.pdf
netCDF
4
If you reuse this data, you should cite: Tanguy, M., Fry, M., Svensson, C., Hannaford, J. (2017). Historic Gridded Standardised Precipitation Index for the United Kingdom 1862-2015 (generated using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010). NERC Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/ed7444fc-8c2a-473e-98cd-e68d3cffa2b0
superseded
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
pointOfContact
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
author
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
author
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
author
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology
author
Environmental Information Data Centre
custodian
NERC Environmental Information Data Centre
publisher
Environmental Information Data Centre
Lancaster Environment Centre, Library Avenue, Bailrigg
Lancaster
LA1 4AP
UK
pointOfContact
2018-10-05T14:20:54