MOnthly temperature lines from different years, colourful, overlaid on black

Data Sets

Climatic Research Unit

The various datasets on the CRU website are provided for all to use, provided the source is acknowledged.

Acknowledgement should usually be made by citing one or more of the papers referenced on the appropriate page. Some datasets are also disseminated via disciplinary data repositories (if indicated on the individual data page), which can provide persistent links to a particular dataset. This website can also be cited if deemed appropriate, though note that the URLs may sometimes be changed.

These datasets are created by CRU. Some are also created by our role in the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) and jointly with other organisations such as the Met Office. We endeavour to update many of the data pages at timely intervals, though some are static and are provided here as an archive.

Instrumental climate data

Temperature (CRUTEM5, HadCRUT5: 1850–present global data on a 5° x 5° grid)

Main webpage for the temperature datasets

High-resolution gridded datasets (CRU TS, CRU CY, CRU CL: 1901–present global land data for multiple variables on a 0.5° x 0.5° or finer grid)

Main webpage for the high-resolution gridded datasets (current version is CRU TS v4.09, 1901–2024)

CRU TS land temperature, precipitation, diurnal range and vapour pressure via Google Earth

Precipitation and Drought

scPDSI drought indices for Global land, Europe and Alps (global land updated to 2022)
Precipitation (CRU TS dataset: global land data on 0.5°x0.5° grid for 1901–present)
Precipitation (Hulme dataset: global land data on 5°x5° and 2.5°x3.75° grids for 1900–1998)

Atmospheric Pressure and Circulation Indices

Pressure data, NAO, SOI and other circulation indices
Lamb Weather Types for the UK and for the Falklands

UK Climate Data

Atmospheric circulation, hydroclimate, temperature observations and future climate projections for the UK

Climate data for individual locations, countries and regions

Miscellaneous observational climate data

Other climate data

Wildfire data

Interactive wildfire atlas

Data about the causes of climate change

Data and interactive atlas on the attribution of global warming to emissions from individual countries

Paleoclimate data

Tree ring data, temperature and NAO reconstructions, IPCC AR4 data

Reanalysis climate data

Daily and 6-hourly NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis data, for a Eurasian window (ASCII) - September 2023: updated with 2022 data

Climate model data and future climate projections

UKCP18 bias-corrected future climate projections
Climate projections using pattern-scaling methods from ClimGen
IPCC Data Distribution Centre (external site for future climate projections, originally set up by CRU & DKRZ)
Simulations of the last 500 to 1000 years from the SO&P project

Data associated with specific papers

Data (and other materials) associated with some specific CRU published papers

You may also want to look at:

KNMI Climate Explorer, where you can download & analyse many CRU datasets.
WMO archive of global weather and climate extremes, an official archive of extremes.

Help and support

Files ending in ".gz" can be decompressed using gzip (most platforms) or jZip (Windows).

We can provide only limited support to dataset users, though we will try to respond. Do tell us if you spot problems that need fixing.

License

Unless otherwise stated on their pages, these datasets are made available under the Open Database License. Any rights in individual contents of the datasets are licensed under the Database Contents License under the conditions of Attribution and Share-Alike. Please use the attribution Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia.