Heating degree day spatial datasets for Canada

Heating degree days (HDD) represent a concise measure of heating energy requirements used to inform decision making about the impact of climate change on heating energy demand. This data paper presents spatial datasets of heating degree days (HDD) for Canada for two thirty-year periods, 1951-1980 and 1981-2010, using daily temperature gauge observations over these time periods. Stations with fewer than nine missing days in a year and greater than nine years of data over each thirty-year period were included, resulting in 1339 and 1679 stations for the 1951-1980 and 1981-2010 periods respectively. Mean absolute error (MAE) of the spatial models ranged from 124.2 Celsius degree days (C-days) for the 1951-1980 model (2.4% of the surface mean) to 137.6 C-days for the 1981-2010 model (2.7%). This note presents maps illustrating cross validation errors at a set of representative stations. The grids are available at ∼2 km resolutions.