HadEX2 provides gridded, station-based indices of temperature- and precipitation- related climate extremes. It is intended for climate change detection and attribution studies and climate model evaluation. Twenty-nine indices, including daily maximum and minimum temperatures, number of frost days, maximum 1-day precipitation, and growing season length are provided for 1901 to 2010 at monthly timesteps on a 2.5° latitude x 3.75 ° longitude grid. Definitions of these core indices follow recommendations set forth by the CCl/CLIVAR/JCOMM Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETTCCDI). Input data are from approximately 7000 temperature and 11000 precipitation observing stations distributed worldwide. The indices are computed for each station, and then the indices are gridded using an angular distance weighting scheme. Compared with the precipitation-based indices, the temperature-based indices generally show larger spatial coherence and large-scale averages that are more robust to sampling gaps.
Key Strengths:
- Large number of indices provided calculated with standard, intuitive definitions of extremes
- Most global coverage of the "extremes" datasets, incorporating stations from Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, in addition to GHCN-Daily
- More quality control and homogenization of stations performed than for GHCNDEX
Key Limitations:
- Not routinely updated
- Underlying station data not as accessible as the GHCN-Daily stations
Years of Record
Timestep
Domain
Spatial Resolution
Ocean or Land
Missing Data Flag
Vertical Levels
Input Data
Suggested Data Citation
Donat, M. G., et al. (2013), Updated analyses of temperature and precipitation extreme indices since the beginning of the twentieth century: The HadEX2 dataset, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, 2098–2118
