SiCLIMA: High-resolution hydroclimate and temperature dataset for Aragón (northeast Spain)

A new high-resolution climatic gridded dataset was built for Aragón (northeast Spain) using a large collection of daily precipitation and temperature observations from more than 3000 weather stations. The grid covers, at the unprecedented spatial resolution of 0.25 km², daily maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation in the 1950-2020 period. The complex orography (from 70 to 3,400 m.a.s.l.) of the medium-sized region (∼48,000 km²) required a climate modelling method based on a spatially-dense weather monitoring network and local predictors. The 3-step workflow for grid creation consisted of: 1) a comprehensive quality control of raw observations, based on a spatial comparison with nearest data; 2) a climate reconstruction based on the creation of reference values, through multivariate linear regressions, for every day and location, based on the observed climate and terrain-based environmental variables; and 3) the prediction of precipitation and temperature values in a regular 500 × 500 m grid, based on the reconstructed data series. The resulting dataset improves the spatial representativity of climate and allows for a detailed analyses at landscape scale not only in climate studies but also in related disciplines such as hydrology or biogeography, amongst others.