Representing Twentieth-Century Space–Time Climate Variability. Part II: Development of 1901–96 Monthly Grids of Terrestrial Surface Climate

The authors describe the construction of a 0.5 lat-long gridded dataset of monthly terrestrial surface climate for the period of 1901-96. The dataset comprises a suite of seven climate elements: precipitation, mean temperature, diurnal temperature range, wet-day frequency, vapor pressure, cloud cover, and ground frost frequency. The spatial coverage extends over all land areas, including oceanic islands but excluding Antarctica. Fields of monthly climate anomalies, relative to the 1961-90 mean, were interpolated from surface climate data. The anomaly grids were then combined with a 1961-90 mean monthly climatology (described in Part I) to arrive at grids of monthly climate over the 96-yr period.