The NERC UK Drought and Water Scarcity Programme has released a large number of datasets, together with interfaces for accessing and visualising data over the web, and guidance for use of the data. For more information on these datasets are available at the below links or email Matt Fry.
Tools for data access
View datasets from the About Drought projects spatially on the Spatial Data Explorer.
The Drought Data Hub provides a simple, visual summary of the data outputs from the About Drought projects.
Historic hydro-meteorological data
Rescued and recovered data
- incorporated into national climatological database and made open access
- incorporated into national climate product (HadUK-Grid)
Historic Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI)
- 5km grid + catchments, 1862-2015 [CEH]
- IHU Groups, 1862-2015 [CEH]
- IHU Hydrometric Areas, 1862-2015 [CEH]
Historic Standardised Streamflow Index (SSI) for 303 catchments (1891-2015) [CEH]
Historic reconstructions of daily river flow for 303 UK catchments (1891-2015) [CEH]
Reconstructed/modelled historic daily river flow for 1366 UK catchments the UK using the Decipher model, 1962-2015 [University of Bristol]
Reconstructed historic groundwater level series for 54 boreholes, 1891-2015 [BGS]
Climate change projection data
Probabilistic time series based on the Weather at Home (W@H) event set (100 ensemble members for each time slice) for a baseline period (19742004) and two future periods (2020-2049 and 2070-2099) under the RCP8.5 high emission scenario.
- Large set of potential past and future climate time series for the UK from the weather@home2 model, on ~25km grid (University of Oxford)
- Grid-to-Grid model estimates of daily mean river flow for gauged catchments in Great Britain: weather@home2 (climate model) driving data [CEH]
- Grid-to-Grid model estimates of monthly mean flow and soil moisture for Great Britain: weather@home2 (climate model) driving data
The multi-disciplinary UK Drought and Water Scarcity research programme has produced a wide range of data outputs from research activities in many disciplines.
Cross-sectoral inventory of past droughts
Historic droughts and irrigated agriculture – Interviews with growers in the Anglian region, UK.
Inventory of reservoirs amounting to 90% of total UK storage
Simulated monthly biological indicators for England and Wales 1964- 2012
References to past droughts from a variety of sectors, integrated into a consistent format to capture spatial and temporal reporting of drought:
- References to droughts in the agricultural media 1975-2012. 2000+ entries referring to drought within UK agricultural media between 1975 and 2012, including information on farm classification.
- References to droughts in legislation. 500+ entries referring to drought within UK legislation between 1976 and 2012, from Hansard debates and other government publications.
- Historic droughts inventory of references from British 19th century newspapers 1800-1900
- Historic droughts inventory of references from British 20th century newspapers 1900-1999
- Historic Droughts Inventory of references from British newspapers (1990–2014)
- Tabloids
- Broadsheets
- Historic droughts inventory of drought references to water resources 1890-2015
Near real-time drought-related metrics
The following drought-related metrics have been focussed on within the Drought and Water Scarcity programme and are accessible in near-real time.
• Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI), 5km grid + catchments, monthly [CEH]
• Standardised Streamflow Index (SSI), selected gauging stations, monthly [CEH]
• Standardised Groundwater Level Index (SGI), selected boreholes, monthly [BGS]
Available through the UK Drought Portal: https://eip.ceh.ac.uk/droughts