Weekly temperature data for Europe on a regional level NUTS 1

Question

I am currently writing my thesis on how temperature affects mortality in Europe.

I obtained an excellent dataset from the Eurostat Database containing weekly Mortality numbers on NUTS1 level (regions). It is important that my data fits this NUTS1 specification (Germany for instance has 16 NUTS1 regions).

So far I've only been able to find daily data from weather stations where the frequency is way too high for my research.

I could do with daily data for NUTS1, NUTS2, or even NUTS3 (Germany is divided into 400 of these).

But when the data is from stations the task of getting data and matching it to coordinates seems a bit much.

I heard something about a software called QGis that can match stations to coordinates but that is not something I have experience doing though.

Any help is much appreciated

Answer 1

The easiest way to access this data is probably to get daily summaries from the NOAA Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily dataset and then aggregate them to weekly values. So if you're interested in how mortality is affected by weekly maximum and minimum temperature, you could calculate that by finding the highest of the daily maximum temperatures for a week and the lowest of the daily minimum temperatures.

You will also have to choose which station(s) you want to represent each NUTS1 region. NUTS1 regions are very large and so the temperature is likely to vary substantially within them. For example in Bavaria the temperature in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (a ski resort in the Alps) is likely to be quite different from the temperature in Bamberg, which is 300km away and 500 metres lower in elevation but still in the same NUTS1 region. There's not much you can do about this if you only have mortality data for NUTS1 regions, but it's a limitation to be aware of. You might want to choose a single station to represent the whole region or calculate the median temperature for all the stations within a NUTS1 region.

You haven't said what software you're using, but if you're using R then you can download NOAA GHCND data directly with the rnoaa package and then aggregate the data as needed. If you're using other software such as Excel or SPSS for your data analysis then you can download the weather data from the NOAA Climate Data Online website.

Answer 2

The ERA5 reanalysis provides monthly averaged values for temperature (and many more weather factors) for any given point on land, going back to 1980.

So while not pre-computed per NUTS1 region, if you have a representative coordinate per region, you get the averages for that coordinate.

The data is available for download from the following webpage:

https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-land-monthly-means