A 19-Years Period (2000-2018) Dataset of Annual and Monthly Spatial Distribution of Rainfall and Average Air Temperature in a Temperate Region for Climate Change Studies

Aims: Temperature changes in the air, land and ocean together with the hydrological cycle and changing precipitation patterns are some of the topics assessed by scientist all over the world in order to study the signals of a changing climate. As the impacts of climate change are expected to be noticed both at global and local scale, a dataset of real-world precipitation and average air temperature at regional scale spanning a period of 19 years is provided and described in the present paper.

Study Design: Starting from cumulative precipitation and average air temperature data, a set of annual and monthly spatially distributed maps have been generated in order to provide the scientific community with regional-scale data related to a temperate climate area.

Place and Duration of Study: Marche Region, East-Central Italy, between January 2000 and December 2018.

Methodology: We used in-situ rainfall and air temperature data provided by Marche Region (Italy) Security and Civil Protection Department in the framework of the regional meteorological and hydrological monitoring network (SIRMIP). SIRMIP network is composed of a mechanical and a telemetric sensing system. SIRMIP network consists of, among others, 230 rain gauges and 137 thermometers.

Rainfall and air temperature data have been interpolated on a 1 km-resolution regular grid using Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) spatial interpolation. Temperature data were further processed through a linear regression using elevation from a high-resolution digital terrain model (DTM).

Results: The generated dataset described in this paper consists of 228 monthly- and 19 annual-spatially distributed maps of rainfall and air temperature.