Development and analysis of a 50-year high-resolution daily gridded precipitation dataset over Spain (Spain02)

In this paper we present a new publicly available high-resolution daily precipi-tation gridded dataset developed for peninsular Spain and the Balearic islands using 2756 quality-controlled stations (this dataset is referred to as Spain02). The grid has a regular 0.2 ◦ (aprox. 20km) horizontal resolution and spans the period from 1950 to 2003. Different interpolation methods were tested using a cross-validation approach to compare the resulting interpolated values against station data: Kriging, Angular Distance Weighting, and Thin Plane Splines. Finally, the grid was produced applying the kriging method in a two-step process. First, the occurrence was interpolated us-ing a binary kriging and, in a second step, the amounts were interpolated by applying ordinary kriging to the occurrence outcomes. This procedure is similar to the interpo-lation method used to generate the E-OBS gridded data —the state-of-the-art publicly available high-resolution daily dataset for Europe — which was used in this work for comparison purposes. Climatological statistics and extreme value indicators from the resulting grid wer