CRU TS4.01: Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Time-Series (TS) version 4.01 of high-resolution gridded data of month-by-month variation in climate (Jan. 1901- Dec. 2016)

The gridded Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Time-series (TS) data version 4.01 data are month-by-month variations in climate over the period 1901-2016, provided on high-resolution (0.5x0.5 degree) grids, produced by CRU at the University of East Anglia.

The CRU TS4.01 variables are cloud cover, diurnal temperature range, frost day frequency, potential evapotranspiration (PET), precipitation, daily mean temperature, monthly average daily maximum and minimum temperature, and vapour pressure for the period January 1901 - December 2016.

The CRU TS4.01 data were produced using angular-distance weighting (ADW) interpolation. All version 3 releases used triangulation routines in IDL. Please see the release notes for full details of this version update. CRU TS4.01 is a full release, differing only in methodology from the parallel release, v3.25. Both are released concurrently to support comparative evaluations between these two versions, however, this will be the last release of version 3.

The CRU TS4.01 data are monthly gridded fields based on monthly observational data calculated from daily or sub-daily data by National Meteorological Services and other external agents. The ASCII and NetCDF data files both contain monthly mean values for the various parameters. The NetCDF versions contain an additional variable, ’stn’, which provides, for each datum in the main variable, a count (between 0 and 8) of the number of stations used in that interpolation.

All CRU TS output files are actual values - NOT anomalies.