Cramer & Leemans Climate Data

The CLIMATE data base of monthly normals for globally gridded climatic variables

This database represents the last major update of the Leemans & Cramer database (Leemans & Cramer 1991), made in 1996 (this work is now discontinued - for more recent grids we refer to the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK). It currently contains long term monthly averages, for the period 1931-60, of mean temperature, temperature range, precipitation, rain days and sunshine hours for the terrestrial surface of the globe, gridded at 0.5 degree longitude/latitude resolution. It was generated from a large data base, using the partial thin-plate splining algorithm developed by Michael F. Hutchinson, Canberra (Hutchinson & Bischof 1983). A documentation is currently in preparation - for the time being the most essential technical information is contained in a readme.file. The version currently online is version 2.1 - this is the same version that is currently used widely around the globe, notably by all groups participating in the IGBP NPP model intercomparison.

Database on web directory

The data are available from here. If you download the data, please send a short message to Wolfgang.Cramer -at- pik-potsdam.de identifying yourself and possibly shortly describing your application. For publication, please refer to the data as "the CLIMATE database version 2.1 (W. Cramer, Potsdam, pers. comm.)"; and please also make sure I know about your publication.

The data files are compressed using the gzip command under unix. Uncompress them with gunzip under unix, or with winzip or something similar on a non-unix machine.

For further questions, please contact me under the e-mail address above, or under the following address:

Wolfgang Cramer
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Telegrafenberg
P.O.Box 60 12 03
D-144 12 Potsdam, Germany

Tel.: +49-331-288-2521
Fax: +49-331-288-2600

Reference

Hutchinson, M.F. & Bischof, R.J. 1983. A new method for estimating the spatial distribution of mean seasonal and annual rainfall applied to the Hunter Valley, New South Wales. Austral. Met. Mag. 31:179-184.

Leemans, R. & Cramer, W. 1991. The IIASA database for mean monthly values of temperature, precipitation and cloudiness of a global terrestrial grid. International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). RR-91-18.