HadUK-Grid is a collection of gridded climate variables derived from the network of UK land surface observations. The data have been interpolated from meteorological station data onto a uniform grid to provide complete and consistent coverage across the UK. The datasets cover the UK at 1 km x 1 km resolution. These 1 km x 1 km data have been used to provide a range of other resolutions and across countries, administrative regions and river basins to allow for comparison to data from UKCP18 climate projections, released annually as verified versions via the CEDA data archive.

Between releases the Met Office make available provisional data for recent months are available to download via the HadObs website. The latest data will be added shortly after the end of each month.

These provisional data can be used to extend the data series available in the latest release on CEDA.

The provisional data are produced for routine monitoring activities at the Met Office. These provisional versions therefore will be subject to amendment or revision before they become part of a fully citeable version of the dataset available from CEDA.

The provisional grids are generated from station observations available in near-real time. Although basic checks to eliminate any obviously suspect values will have been applied, the observations will not have been through the full quality control process. The provisional grids will also be based on fewer stations than the annual releases as not all stations report in near-real time. This is most significant for rainfall for which a large proportion of the observations are received in slower time.

The provisional data files are only provided for a subset of the full HadUK-Grid dataset. The gridded data are produced for daily, monthly, seasonal and annual timescales, as well as long term averages for a set of climatological reference periods. Variables include air temperature (maximum, minimum and mean), precipitation, sunshine, wind speed, and days of ground frost. Four variables are not included because the files are not generated in near-real time - these are relative humidity, mean sea level pressure, vapour pressure and days of snow lying. Seasonal and annual grids and area averages are also excluded. National and regional averages can be found on the Met Office website.

To reduce storage requirements and download times we have applied additional file compression to the provisional datasets compared to the annual release. This will have the effect of a small reduction in the precision of the data.

Note that this is not an operational service and this page will be maintained on a best endeavours basis. Data files will be removed from here once they have been superseded by the next annual release.

The primary purpose of these data are to facilitate monitoring of UK climate and research into climate change, impacts and adaptation. The datasets have been created by the Met Office with financial support from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in order to support the Public Weather Service Customer Group (PWSCG), the Hadley Centre Climate Programme, and the UK Climate Projections (UKCP18) project. The output from a number of data recovery activities relating to 19th and early 20th Century data have been used in the creation of this dataset, these activities were supported by: the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme; the Natural Environment Research Council project "Analysis of historic drought and water scarcity in the UK"; the UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund UK Climate Resilience programme; The UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Public Engagement programme; the National Centre for Atmospheric Science; National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the NERC GloSAT project; and the contribution of many thousands of public volunteers. The dataset is provided under Open Government Licence.