EMO-5: A high-resolution multi-variable gridded meteorological data set for Europe

Abstract. In this paper we present EMO-51, a European high-resolution, (sub-)daily, multi-variable meteorological data set built on historical and real-time observations obtained by integrating data from 18,964 ground weather stations, four high-resolution regional observational grids (i.e. CombiPrecip, ZAMG - INCA, EURO4M-APGD and CarpatClim) as well as one global reanalysis (ERA-Interim/Land). EMO-5 includes at daily resolution: total precipitation, temperatures (mean, minimum and maximum), wind speed, solar radiation and water vapour pressure. In addition, EMO-5 also makes available 6-hourly precipitation and mean temperature. The raw observations from the ground weather stations underwent a set of quality controls, before SPHEREMAP and Yamamoto interpolation methods were applied in order to estimate for each 5 x 5 km grid cell the variable value and its affiliated uncertainty, respectively. The quality of the EMO-5 precipitation data was evaluated through (1) comparison with two regional high resolution data sets (i.e. seNorge2 and seNorge2018), (2) analysis of 15 heavy precipitation events, and (3) examination of the interpolation uncertainty. Results show that EMO-5 successfully captured 80 % of the heavy precipitation events, and that it is of comparable quality to a regional high resolution data set. The availability of the uncertainty fields increases the transparency of the data set and hence the possible usage. EMO-5 (release 1) covers the time period from 1990 to 2019, with a near real-time release of the latest gridded observations foreseen soon. As a product of Copernicus, the EU's Earth observation programme, EMO-5 dataset is free and open, and can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.2905/0BD84BE4-CEC8-4180-97A6-8B3ADAAC4D26 (Thiemig et al., 2021). 1 EMO stands for “European Meteorological Observations”, whereas the 5 denotes the spatial resolution of 5 km.