CRU TS Gridded precipitation and other meteorological variables since 1901

The CRU TS series of data sets (CRU TS = Climatic Research Unit Time series) contain gridded monthly fields of precipitation, daily maximum and minimum temperatures, cloud cover, and other variables covering Earth's land areas for 1901-2022 (CRU TS4.0 is the recent major release). The data set is gridded to 0.5x0.5 degree resolution, based on analysis of over 4000 individual weather station records, and spatially complete. Many of the input records have been homogenized, but the data set itself is not strictly homogeneous. Long-term trends of air temperature over large areas are very similar to data sets such as CRUTEM4. The precipitation data have been used to assess global precipitation variability and to derive gridded drought indices such as the sc-PDSI and the SPI. The large number of variables enables many additional studies of climate variability and extremes. Nonetheless, when possible, studies of trends should consider whether the trends are physically consistent with other variables from independent data sets. This is particularly important when using CRU TS to assess questions around variability and extremes and the dataset reports climatological values for grid cells without sufficient reporting stations.