Met Office Hadley Centre observations datasets: HadUK-Grid
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HadUK-Grid - Provisional Data

This page provides access to provisional data for recent months which can be used to extend the existing HadUK-Grid data series available on the CEDA Archive.


Overview

The HadUK-Grid dataset is a collection of gridded climate data for the UK based on observations from the UK's land network of weather stations.

The grids are available for different climate variables - temperature, rainfall, sunshine, relative humidity, mean sea level pressure, vapour pressure, wind speed, days of ground frost and days of snow lying.

Most variables are provided at monthly, seasonal and annual resolution. Temperature and rainfall are also available as daily grids.

The monthly temperature and rainfall grids are available from 1884 and 1836 onwards respectively. Other variables have shorter series.

The grids are available at five resolutions: 1km, 5km, 12km, 25km and 60km. The data are also available as area averages.

More details can be found on the Met Office website.


Annual releases

A new version of the HadUK-Grid dataset is released each year, typically in late spring/early summer. Each release contains data up to the end of December of the previous year.

The latest release of HadUK-Grid is v1.3.0.0, which contains data up to Dec 2023.

Each release can be downloaded from the CEDA Archive.


Provisional data

Provisional data for recent months are available to download via the links below. The latest data will be added here shortly after the end of each month.

These provisional data can be used to extend the data series available in the latest release on CEDA.

The provisional data are produced for routine monitoring activities at the Met Office. These provisional versions therefore will be subject to amendment or revision before they become part of a fully citeable version of the dataset available from CEDA.

The provisional grids are generated from station observations available in near-real time. Although basic checks to eliminate any obviously suspect values will have been applied, the observations will not have been through the full quality control process. The provisional grids will also be based on fewer stations than the annual releases as not all stations report in near-real time. This is most significant for rainfall for which a large proportion of the observations are received in slower time.

The provisional data files are only provided for a subset of the full HadUK-Grid dataset. Four variables are not included because the files are not generated in near-real time - these are relative humidity, mean sea level pressure, vapour pressure and days of snow lying. Seasonal and annual grids and area averages are also excluded. National and regional averages can be found on the Met Office website.

To reduce storage requirements and download times we have applied additional file compression to the provisional datasets compared to the annual release. This will have the effect of a small reduction in the precision of the data.

Note that this is not an operational service and this page will be maintained on a best endeavours basis. Data files will be removed from here once they have been superseded by the next annual release.


Licensing

The HadUK-Grid datasets are freely available for use under Open Government Licence. However, please acknowledge the source if the data are used in any report or product.


References

When using the data set in a paper, the correct citation to use for HadUK-Grid is:

Other relevant references include: