RoCliHom - Long-term homogenized air temperature and precipitation datasets in Romania, 1901 - 2023

The RoClimHom database encompasses temporally aggregated instrumental observations of diurnal temperature parameters, including mean (Tavg), maximum (Tmax), and minimum (Tmin) air temperatures measured at 2 meters above ground level (T2m), as well as precipitation accumulation (PREC). The dataset integrates meteorological records from a network of 156 monitoring stations, with temporal coverage extending from 1901 to 2023.

This dataset addresses historical inconsistencies in climate records caused by changes in measurement techniques, station relocations, and operational practices. The homogenization process included data preprocessing, quality control, and breakpoint detection to eliminate non-climatic biases, ensuring a robust and reliable dataset.

RoClimHom overcomes potential biases in temperature and precipitation measurements, offering a gap-free record for analyzing long-term climate variability and trends in Romania. Preliminary trend analyses indicate more consistent climate change signals across the country.

The dataset is distributed in long-format CSV files, comprising roclihom_meta_1901_2023.csv for metadata and roclihom_data_1901_2023.csv for observational records.

roclihom_data_1901_2023.csv is structured in a way that each row contains the relevant variables —tavg (average air temperature- °C), tmax (maximum air temperature - °C), tmin (minimum air temperature - °C), and prec (precipitation - mm) — along with corresponding flag columns. These flags indicate the status of the data as follows: 0 for original values, 1 for only gap-filled data, and 2 for corrected (homogenized) values. Additionally, the dataset includes station identifier (id) and temporal information.

roclihom_meta_1901_2023.csv contains details for each station, including station ids, geographical coordinates (in decimal degrees for both longitude and latitude), altitude (in meters), and station names.