Daily temperature data used to assess urbanisation trends

This page is a portal to all of the daily station temperature data which the Met Office Hadley Centre has legal permission to disseminate from the studies on calm vs. windy trends by David Parker (Nature, 432, 290 (2004) and Journal of Climate, 19, 2882-2895 (2006)). Please note that some data were provided to us under the explicit condition that we did not onwardly disseminate them. These data are not provided here for this reason.

Brief description of the data

The data are available as ASCII files on a station by station basis. They are daily maximum and minimum temperatures for the specified station. The data were used in the two publications to show that, on average over a wide range of locations, there is no discernible difference in the trends between windy and calm nights and hence that there is only likely to be a minimal urban heat island effect in the  historical records used to estimate global warming over land.

Timeseries for windy (dashed) and calm (dotted) night minimum temperatures, relative to the approximately 1961-1990 overall climatology, for a worldwide set of stations. There is no difference in the long-term trend behaviour.

Data are available from the download page without charge for the purposes of private study and scientific research, but please read the terms and conditions. You do not have to register, but it will help us if you do. For problems getting or understanding the data, or to suggest some improvement please leave feedback. If you find the data useful, please return and tell us what you did with them. Commercial and media enquiries You can access the Met Office Customer Centre, any time of the day or night by phone, fax or e-mail. Trained staff will help you find the information or products that are right for you. Contact the Met Office Customer Centre References When using the data set in a paper, the following are the correct citations to use: Parker, D.E., 2006, A demonstration that large-scale warming is not urban. J. Clim, 19: 2882-2895 (PDF 1.0Mb) Parker, D.E., 2004, Climate - Large-scale warming is not urban. Nature, 432: 290

Dataset produced in collaboration with:

Maintained by: David parker Last updated: 26/06/2007 Expires: 26/06/2008 Hosted by: Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change

© Crown Copyright