Homogenized daily sunshine duration at 2°×2° over China from 1961 to 2022

Inhomogeneities in the sunshine duration (SSD) observational series, caused by non-climatic factors like China’s widespread transition from manual to automatic SSD recorders in 2019 or station relocations, have hindered accurate estimate of near-surface solar radiation for the analysis of global dimming and brightening as well as related applications, such as solar energy planning and agriculture management. This dataset compiled raw SSD observational data from 1961 to 2022 at more than 2,200 stations in China, corrected the artificial issue regarding zero-value frequency associated with the instrument upgrade in 2019, and constructed a homogenization procedure to detect and adjust discontinuities in both the variance and mean of daily SSD. This produces a homogenized dataset of daily sunshine duration at 2.0×2.0 grids in China from 1961 to 2022 for community use, which provides a valuable database for assessing and attributing solar radiation variations, and will also be a key for various applications in the solar energy industry, agricultural management, and ecology and climatology research for our community.