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., &amp; Smith, M. (1998). <em>Crop Evapotranspiration: Guidelines for Computing Crop Water Requirements</em>. Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Beguería, S., &amp; López-Moreno, J. I. (2010). A multiscalar drought index sensitive to global warming: The standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index. <em>Journal of Climate</em>, <em>23</em>(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. <em>Data</em>, <em>2</em>(3), 22. https://doi.org/10.3390/data2030022