UKCP09: Gridded Annual Growing Degree Days for the UK

UKCP09 provides gridded datasets of annual values for Growing Degree Days, a temperature-based metric for plant growth. The datasets were created with financial support from the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and are promoted by the UK Climate Impacts Programme. Data access requires registration on the Met Office website.

Use Cases

• Modeling crop phenology and yield potential based on temperature thresholds for plant growth.
• Assessing climate change impacts on agricultural zones using gridded annual temperature sums.
• Projecting future growing seasons and heat accumulation for horticulture and forestry planning.
• Calibrating ecological models that use growing degree days as a predictor for species distribution.

Strengths

• Data is part of the official UK Climate Projections (UKCP09), an authoritative source for UK climate information.
• The description specifies two concrete temperature thresholds (5.5°C and 22°C) for calculating the metric.
• The dataset is gridded, suggesting spatially continuous coverage across the UK.

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 bias inherent to the UKCP09 source, focusing solely on the UK.

Provenance

Source

Met Office, with support from the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Collection Method

Likely derived from climate model projections and observational data, processed into gridded annual values.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:30:53.768729; freshness should be verified.

Geography

United Kingdom, as implied by the UKCP09 project.