Standardized Climatic Water Balance for Poland (1951–2023)

This dataset contains high-resolution, gridded Standardized Climatic Water Balance (SCWB) layers for Poland spanning 72 years, from 1951 to 2023. The dataset was developed as part of a research initiative to assess long-term water availability and drought conditions in the context of changing climate regimes. The input dataset includes monthly temperature and precipitation records from over 2,000 meteorological stations, provided by the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management – National Research Institute (URL: https://danepubliczne.imgw.pl/data/dane_pomiarowo_obserwacyjne/), as well as elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM, DOI: 10.5069/G9445JDF). The dataset is created by spatial interpolation using a hybrid regression-spline model (Dataset DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.16793822), calculation of potential evapotranspiration via the Thornthwaite method, and standardization of the climatic water balance to produce SCWB values that are comparable across space and time. The resulting dataset contains monthly raster layers of the SCWB with a spatial resolution of 100 m x 100 m, an EPSG code of 3035, and an integer format of 16 bits with a scale multiplier of 0.001. The files are packed into ZIP archives, each containing ten years of SCWB data. All files are freely available and suitable for use in environmental monitoring, drought risk assessment, forest ecosystem analysis, and climate adaptation planning at regional and local scales.