High-resolution daily gridded data sets of air temperature and wind speed for Europe

Abstract. New high-resolution data sets for near-surface daily air temperature (minimum, maximum and mean) and daily mean wind speed for Europe (the CORDEX domain) are provided for the period 2001–2010 for the purpose of regional model validation in the framework of DecReg, a sub-project of the German MiKlip project, which aims to develop decadal climate predictions. The main input data sources are SYNOP observations, partly supplemented by station data from the ECA&D data set (http://www.ecad.eu). These data are quality tested to eliminate erroneous data. By spatial interpolation of these station observations, grid data in a resolution of 0.044° (≈ 5km) on a rotated grid with virtual North Pole at 39.25° N, 162° W are derived. For temperature interpolation a modified version of a regression kriging method developed by Krähenmann et al.(2011) is used. At first, predictor fields of altitude, continentality and zonal mean temperature are used for a regression applied to monthly station data. The residuals of the monthly regression and the deviations of the daily data from the monthly averages are interpolated using simple kriging in a second and third step. For wind speed a n