Datasets for flash drought analysis in Spain (1961-2018)

The datasets contain information of high spatial resolution (1.21 km2) and weekly frequency in NetCDF format for flash drought analysis in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands over the period 1961-2018, including both the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and meteorological data required for its calculation [i.e., precipitation and reference evapotranspiration (ETo)]. The precipitation and ETo datasets were created using all daily observational information of precipitation, maximum and minimum air temperature, relative humidity, sunshine duration (as a surrogate of solar radiation) and wind speed from the National Spanish Meteorological Service (AEMET). FAO-56 Penman–Monteith equation (R. G. Allen et al., 1998) was used to calculate the reference evapotranspiration (ETo), which is a spatially and temporally comparable metric for the atmospheric evaporative demand (AED). Additional details of the dataset development and validation have been described in Vicente-Serrano et al. (2017). The SPEI was computed at a 1-month time scale following the methodology proposed by Vicente-Serrano et al. (2010). References: Allen, R. G., Pereira, L. S., Raes, D., & Smith, M. (1998). Crop Evapotranspiration: Guidelines for Computing Crop Water Requirements. Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Beguería, S., & López-Moreno, J. I. (2010). A multiscalar drought index sensitive to global warming: The standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index. Journal of Climate, 23(7), 1696–1718. https://doi.org/10.1175/2009JCLI2909.1 Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Tomas-Burguera, M., Beguería, S., Reig, F., Latorre, B., Peña-Gallardo, M., et al. (2017). A High Resolution Dataset of Drought Indices for Spain. Data, 2(3), 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/data2030022