A city-year dataset of residual-based tail physical climate risk for Chinese cities, 1973 to 2024

This article describes a city-year dataset of residual-based tail physical climate risk for Chinese cities from 1973 to 2024. The released panel covers 368 prefecture-level cities and 19,136 city-year observations built from 6981,696 harmonized city-day records. The dataset is constructed from harmonized daily precipitation and temperature records and provides standardized annual indices of distributional tail risk for precipitation and temperature at the city level. For each city, the daily series are reduced to seasonal residuals by removing a low-order Fourier climatology in day of year, with no time trend or calendar fixed effects subtracted. Tail exposure is then accumulated from these residuals as annual exceedance intensities over a grid of city-specific quantile supports, standardized across city-years, and combined into composite precipitation, temperature, and overall city-level indices. The novelty of the dataset is that extremity is measured from city-specific seasonal residuals and defined relative to each city's own empirical distribution rather than by common national or absolute thresholds, which makes the tail measures comparable across the heterogeneous climate regimes of China. The released files include the standardized composite tail-risk indices for precipitation, temperature, and the overall city level, geographic identifiers, a harmonized city-day weather panel, a city identifier crosswalk, construction code, a variable dictionary, and a README file. The dataset can be reused in climate finance, urban vulnerability, regional adaptation, environmental policy, and location-based exposure mapping.