Gridded Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) using generalised logistic distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPEIgenlog61-10]

1km and 5km gridded Standardised Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) data for Great Britain, which is a drought index based on the probability of Climatic Water Balance (CWB) - which is equivalent to the amount of precipitation minus the amount of evapotranspiration - for a given accumulation period as defined by Vicente Serrano et al. (2010). SPEI is calculated for different accumulation periods: 1, 3, 6, 12, 18, 24 months. Each of these is in turn calculated for each of the twelve calendar months. Note that values in monthly (and for longer accumulation periods also annual) time series of the data therefore are likely to be autocorrelated. The standard period which was used to fit the generalised logistic distribution is 1961-2010. The dataset covers the period from 1961 to 2012. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/d201a2af-568e-4195-bf02-961fb6954c72

Date (Publication): 2015-11-09

Date (Creation): 2015-10-01

Citation identifier: https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/d201a2af-568e-4195-bf02-961fb6954c72

Citation identifier: doi: / 10.5285/d201a2af-568e-4195-bf02-961fb6954c72

Other citation details: Tanguy, M., Hannaford, J., Barker, L., Svensson, C., Kral, F., Fry, M. (2015). Gridded Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) using generalised logistic distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPEIgenlog61-10]. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre 10.5285/d201a2af-568e-4195-bf02-961fb6954c72

Point of contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology	Tanguy, M.	enquiries@ceh.ac.uk	Point of contact
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology	Tanguy, M.	enquiries@ceh.ac.uk	Originator
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology	Tanguy, M.	enquiries@ceh.ac.uk	Author
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology	Hannaford, J.	enquiries@ceh.ac.uk	Author
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology	Barker, L.	enquiries@ceh.ac.uk	Author
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology	Svensson, C.	enquiries@ceh.ac.uk	Author
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology	Kral, F.	enquiries@ceh.ac.uk	Author
Centre for Ecology & Hydrology	Fry, M.	enquiries@ceh.ac.uk	Author
NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre		info@eidc.ac.uk	Custodian
NERC Environmental Information Data Centre		info@eidc.ac.uk	Publisher

Maintenance and update frequency: Not planned

GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0

Meteorological geographical features

GEMET - Concepts, version 4.1.3

Keywords

Environmental risk
Modelling
SPEI
indicator
gridded data
rainfall extremes
climatic water balance

Access constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: Registration is required to access this data

Use constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: License terms and conditions apply

Use constraints: Other restrictions

Other constraints: If you reuse this data, you should cite: Tanguy, M., Hannaford, J., Barker, L., Svensson, C., Kral, F., Fry, M. (2015). Gridded Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) using generalised logistic distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPEIgenlog61-10]. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/d201a2af-568e-4195-bf02-961fb6954c72

Spatial representation type: Grid

Distance: 1000 urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001

Distance: 5000 urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001

Language: English

Character set: UTF8

Topic category

Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere

Begin date: 1961-01-01

End date: 2012-12-31

Unique resource identifier: OSGB 1936 / British National Grid

Distribution format

Name	Version
netCDF	4

Distributor contact

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre		info@eidc.ac.uk	Distributor

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/datastore/eidchub/d201a2af-568e-4195-bf02-961fb6954c72	Access and download the raw data files

OnLine resource

Protocol	Linkage	Name
	https://data-package.ceh.ac.uk/sd/d201a2af-568e-4195-bf02-961fb6954c72.zip	Supporting information

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Other: dataset

Conformance result

Title: Commission Regulation (EU) No 1089/2010 of 23 November 2010 implementing Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council as regards interoperability of spatial data sets and services

Date (Publication): 2010-12-08

Statement: SPEI is calculated as originally defined in [1]. SPEI is based on the cumulative probability of a given Climatic Water Balance (CWB) - which is equivalent to the amount of precipitation minus the amount of evapotranspiration - occurring at a location. The historic CWB data of the station is fitted to a statistical distribution. For this dataset, the statistical distribution used is the generalised logistic distribution, which is recommended by [1]. The Maximum Likelihood method was used to estimate the generalised logistic distribution parameters. To calculate SPEI, the R package SCI was used [4]. The input data used is the monthly rainfall grids from CEH-Gridded Estimates of Areal Rainfall [CEH-GEAR] ([4], [5]), and CHESS PET data ([6],[7]). [1] Vicente-Serrano, S. M., Beguería, S., López-Moreno, J. I. (2010) A Multiscalar Drought Index Sensitive to Global Warming: The Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index. J. Climate, 23, 1696-1718. [2] Stagge, J. H., Tallaksen, L. M., Gudmundsson, L., Van Loon, A. F. and Stahl, K. (2015), Candidate Distributions for Climatological Drought Indices (SPI and SPEI). Int. J. Climatol. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.4267 [3] Gudmundsson, L. & Stagge, J. H. (2014). Package 'SCI': Standardized Climate Indices such as SPI, SRI or SPEI. Repository CRAN, http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SCI/SCI.pdf [4] Tanguy, M., Dixon, H., Prosdocimi, I., Morris, D. G., Keller, V. D. J. (2014). Gridded estimates of daily and monthly areal rainfall for the United Kingdom (1890-2012) [CEH-GEAR]. NERC-Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/5dc179dc-f692-49ba-9326-a6893a503f6e [5] Keller,V. D. J., Tanguy, M. , Prosdocimi, I. , Terry, J. A. , Hitt, O., Cole, S. J. , Fry, M., Morris, D. G., Dixon, H. (2015) CEH-GEAR: 1km resolution daily and monthly areal rainfall estimates for the UK for hydrological use. Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., 8, 83-112 https://doi.org/10.5194/essdd-8-83-2015. [6] Robinson, E. L., Blyth, E., Clark, D. B., Finch, J., Rudd, A. C. (in preparation), Trends in evaporative demand in Great Britain using high-resolution meteorological data [7] Robinson, E.L.; Blyth, E.; Clark, D.B.; Finch, J.; Rudd, A.C. (2015). Climate hydrology and ecology research support system potential evapotranspiration dataset for Great Britain (1961-2012) [CHESS-PE]. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre. https://doi.org/10.5285/d329f4d6-95ba-4134-b77a-a377e0755653

Metadata

File identifier: d201a2af-568e-4195-bf02-961fb6954c72 XML

Metadata language: English

Character set: 8859 Part 1

Hierarchy level: Dataset

Hierarchy level name: dataset

Date stamp: 2026-02-06T14:12:46

Metadata standard name: UK GEMINI

Metadata standard version: 2.3

Metadata author

Organisation name	Individual name	Electronic mail address	Role
NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre		info@eidc.ac.uk	Point of contact

Overviews

Spatial extent

Provided by

Access to the catalogue

Read here the full details and access to the data.

Simple

Conformance result

Metadata

Overviews

Spatial extent

Keywords

Provided by

Share on social sites