Data
The data set
described here provides a country-by-country summary of the mean climate
in the recent past (1961-1990). It should be noted that any single country
may contain substantial spatial variations of climate within it, and that
climate changes over time.
Ownership
These data
may be freely used, provided they are attributed to the following source:
Mitchell
TD, Hulme M, and New M, 2002: Climate data for political areas. Area 34:109-112
Disclaimer
The countries
listed below include a variety of sovereign states, dependent territories,
and disputed territories. No political statement is being made by the inclusion
or exclusion of a particular territory, or by the labelling of a particular
territory by a particular name.
Data
Manipulation
The page is
designed to allow the data to be copied into a text file, which can then
be opened in a spreadsheet and manipulated.
Display
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is difficult to read because:
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Printing
Because of
the width of the table you will obtain a better printout if you set your
printer to landscape mode rather than portrait mode.
Variables
and Units
T mean daily
mean temperature (degrees Celsius)
T min daily
minimum temperature (degrees Celsius)
T max daily
maximum temperature (degrees Celsius)
T range daily
temperature range (degrees Celsius)
frost frost
day frequency (per month)
precip precipitation
(millimetres per day)
wetdays wet
day frequency (per month)
vapour vapour
pressure (hectaPascals)
cloud cloud
cover (percentage)
Time Periods
Values are
given for the year (ann), each season (e.g. March-April-May = MAM), and
each month (e.g. January = Jan).
Data
Processing
The original
data took the form of a value for each month and each box on a 0.5 degree
latitude / longitude grid. We assigned each box to a single country. For
each country we calculated the mean of the values from its constituent
grid boxes for each month in turn. The seasonal and annual values are the
means of their constituent months.
Original
Data
The original
data is available from ipcc-ddc.cru.uea.ac.uk.
It was published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal:
New, M., Hulme,
M., and Jones, P., 1999: Representing twentieth-century space-time climate
variability. Part I: Development of a 1961-1990 mean monthly terrestrial
climatology. Journal of Climate 12: 829-856.
Links
email:
t.mitchell@uea.ac.uk
web:
www.uea.ac.uk/~f709762
institution:
www.tyndall.ac.uk
other countries:
countries.htm
Dr. T. D. Mitchell
July 2001
