International Climate Benchmarks and Input Parameters for a Stochastic Weather Generator, CLIGEN

This dataset represents CLIGEN input parameters for locations in 68 countries. CLIGEN is a point-scale stochastic weather generator that produces long-term weather simulations with daily output. The input parameters are essentially monthly climate statistics that also serve as climate benchmarks. Three unique input parameter sets are differentiated by having been produced from 30-year, 20-year and 10-year minimum record lengths that correspond to 7673, 2336, and 2694 stations, respectively. The primary source of data is the NOAA GHCN-Daily dataset, and due to data gaps, records longer than the three minimum record lengths were often queried to produce the needed number of complete monthly records. The vast majority of stations used at least some data from the 2000's, and temporal coverages are shown in the Excel table for each station. CLIGEN has various applications including being used to force soil erosion models. This dataset may reduce the effort needed in preparing climate inputs for such applications.