Weather data and code for a composite weather index in the Maine lobster fishery, 2010–2022

This archive contains the publicly available weather data, extraction code, and derived weather-index dataset supporting Everyday Adaptation in a Gilded Trap: Risk-Taking and Resilience in Maine's Lobster Fishery. Daily weather conditions were derived from ERA5 hourly reanalysis for 2010–2022 at 14 sampling points: the seven Maine lobster management zones (A–G), each split into an inshore and an offshore area, sampled at the centroid of each polygon. Five variables were extracted — 2 m air temperature, 10 m wind speed, instantaneous 10 m wind gust, significant wave height, and mean wave period — and combined into a single composite index of adverse working conditions using principal component analysis, with temperature re-expressed as squared deviation from a thermally comfortable working range so that both cold and hot days score as adverse. The archive includes the 65 ERA5 NetCDF files retrieved for the study, the R scripts that extract them to daily values and construct the index, the intermediate per-variable daily files, and the final dataset of 66,472 daily observations. A complete data dictionary, the exact Copernicus Climate Data Store request needed to recreate the download, and a set of reproducibility checks are documented in README.md. Harvester licence records, landings records, and individual trip records used in the associated study are confidential and are not included. Code in this archive is released under the MIT License; derived data under CC BY 4.0. Redistributed ERA5 files remain subject to the Copernicus licence. See LICENSE.txt.