Abstract. SCOPE Climate (Spatially COherent
Probabilistic Extended Climate dataset) is a 25-member ensemble of 142-year
daily high-resolution reconstructions of precipitation, temperature, and
Penman–Monteith reference evapotranspiration over France, from 1 January 1871
to 29 December 2012. SCOPE Climate provides an ensemble of 25 spatially
coherent gridded multivariate time series. It is derived from the statistical
downscaling of the Twentieth Century Reanalysis (20CR) by the SCOPE method,
which is based on the
analogue approach. SCOPE Climate performs well in comparison to both
dependent and independent data for precipitation and temperature. The
ensemble aspect corresponds to the uncertainty related to the SCOPE method.
SCOPE Climate is the first century-long gridded high-resolution homogeneous
dataset available over France and thus has paved the way for improving
knowledge on specific past meteorological events or for improving
knowledge on climate variability, since the end of the 19th century. This
dataset has also been designed as a forcing dataset for long-term
hydrological applications and studies of the hydrological consequences of
climate variability over France. SCOPE Climate is freely available for any
non-commercial use and can be downloaded as NetCDF files from
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1299760 for precipitation,
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1299712 for temperature, and
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1251843 for reference evapotranspiration.