Supporting data for: Development of alternate climate divisions for Colorado based on gridded data

The official climate divisions for the contiguous United States are used for a wide range of purposes, including ongoing climate monitoring, and through NOAA's long-standing nClimDiv dataset. In Colorado, the climate divisions are based around the basins of the large rivers that flow out of the state. However, considering the complex topography and climate of the state, these divisions do not always represent key climate variations and changes. This study builds upon an approach first developed by Wolter and Allured to establish alternate climate divisions that more closely reflect observed climate variability across Colorado. Hierarchical cluster analysis is applied to gridded temperature and precipitation data (NOAA's nClimGrid) from 1950–2021 to identify areas with similar climate variability, then manual inspection is used to establish 11 divisions. These resulting divisions are being used in an updated state-level climate change assessment. The method is flexible and uses open-sour..., Because NOAA's nClimGrid data sometimes changes retrospectively (owing to late-arriving observations, etc.), the version of the data used for the cluster analysis (obtained in April 2022) is provided here., , # Supporting data for \"Development of alternate climate divisions for Colorado based on gridded data\"

NOAA's nClimGrid monthly temperature and precipitation dataset, originally obtained from [NOAA](https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/thredds/catalog/data-in-development/nclimgrid/catalog.html) in April 2022 and spatially subset to Colorado.

## Description of the data and file structure

Two files are provided, the monthly average temperature and the monthly average precipitation, from 1895-2021 over Colorado. File format is netCDF; data are on a latitude/longitude grid with approximately 4-km horizontal grid spacing.

## Sharing/Access information

Data was derived from