U.S. Temperature Severity Indicators for Extreme Heat and Cold, 1913-2012

1913 to 2012 observational data for the contiguous United States, processed into 1-degree latitude by 1-degree longitude grid cells. The dataset, created by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, distills information on the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme heat and cold events to inform housing and community development policy.

Use Cases

• Modeling long-term climate risk for housing resilience based on historical extreme temperature frequency and duration.
• Informing community development policy based on gridded indicators of heat wave and cold snap intensity.
• Assessing geographic disparities in temperature severity for targeted infrastructure investment.
• Calibrating climate adaptation strategies based on a century of observational temperature data.

Strengths

• Century-long temporal coverage from 1913 to 2012.
• Spatial coverage includes the entire contiguous United States.
• Indicators are derived from Berkeley Earth Lab gridded daily temperature data.
• Data is structured as a 1-degree latitude by 1-degree longitude grid for spatial analysis.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic or temporal bias inherent to the source observational network.

Provenance

Source

Department of Housing and Urban Development

Collection Method

Created from observational data (Berkeley Earth Lab gridded daily maximum and minimum temperature).

Time Range

1913-2012

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-11 13:06:29.685271; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Contiguous United States