E-OBS gridded dataset

E-OBS version 5.0 has been released. E-OBS is a daily gridded observational dataset for precipitation, temperature and sea level pressure in Europe based on ECA & D information. The full dataset covers the period 1950-01-01 until 2011-06-30. It has originally been developed as part of the ENSEMBLES project (EU-FP6) and is now maintained and elaborated as part of the EURO4M project (EU-FP7). The datafiles contain gridded data for 5 elements (daily mean temperature TG, daily minimum temperature TN, daily maximum temperature TX, daily precipitation sum RR and daily averaged sea level pressure PP). They cover the area: 25N-75N x 40W-75E. The data files are in compressed NetCDF format and range in size from 74Mb — 1.1Gb. There are 4 different versions: 2 grid resolutions x 2 grid flavors. Data is made available on a 0.25 and 0.5 degree regular lat-lon grid, as well as on a 0.22 and 0.44 degree rotated pole grid, with the north pole at 39.25N, 162W. The regular grid is the same as the monthly CRU data grids available from the Climatic Research Unit. The rotated grid is the same as used in many ENSEMBLES Regional Climate Models. Besides ‘best estimate’ values, separate files are provided containing daily standard errors and elevation. See Haylock et al. (2008) and van den Besselaar et al. (2011) for further details.