High-resolution gridded datasets of hydro-climate indices for Ireland

This report describes the application of numerical weather prediction (NWP) simulations to develop high-quality, long-term, gridded climate datasets of hydro-climate variables for Ireland, covering the period 1981 2016. There is constant demand for such datasets from industry, research and governmental agencies for use in fields such as agriculture, water resource estimation and management, hydrology and hydrogeology, public health, energy and planning and studies on observed climate change trends and vulnerability. Variables such as evapotranspiration and soil moisture conditions are crucial factors in estimating water sustainability, understanding groundwater recharge, agronomic management and the management of flood and drought risk. However, with the exception of temperature and precipitation, spatially and temporally homogeneous, multi-decadal, gridded observational climate datasets are not readily available for hydro-climatic research applications in Ireland.This report is published as part of the EPA Research Programme 2014–2020. The EPA Research Programme is a Government of Ireland initiative funded by the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment. It is administered by the Environmental Protection Agency, which has the statutory function of co-ordinating and promoting environmental research. The project team would like to thank the project’s co-funders, namely the Environmental Protection Agency and Geological Survey of Ireland, for contributing towards this project. The project team also wish to thank Eoin Whelan, Seamus Walsh and Emily Gleeson of Met Éireann for providing critical datasets for this project, and Raemonn Fealy of Teagasc for providing the Irish Indicative Soil Drainage dataset. The project team thank Alastair McKinstry of the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) for his assistance in uploading the datasets produced in this project to the ICHEC ERDDAP server. The authors would like to acknowledge the members of the project steering committee, namely Keith Lambkin (Met Éireann), Taly Hunter Williams (Geological Survey of Ireland), Conor Quinlan (Environmental Protection Agency), Ian Holman (Cranfield University) and Edward Tully (Irish Water). The research was carried out at ICHEC.peer-reviewe