VEMAP 2: U.S. Historical Monthly Climate Grids, 1895-1993

VEMAP 2 provides a ~100-year gridded time series of monthly and daily climate for the conterminous United States, designed with physical consistency among variables. This historical dataset was specifically created to be concatenated with climate change scenarios, enabling ecological models to simulate responses from 1895 to approximately 2100. It includes key variables like minimum and maximum temperature, precipitation, vapor pressure, and solar radiation for biogeochemical modeling.

Use Cases

• Modeling time-dependent ecological responses of biogeochemical models based on historical climate time series.
• Comparing ecosystem model outputs to projected climate change scenarios using the concatenated 1895-~2100 series.
• Analyzing interannual climate variability and its consistency with topography across the conterminous U.S.
• Providing physically consistent daily input variables (temperature, precipitation, radiation, vapor pressure) for VEMAP2 models.

Strengths

• Covers a long historical period of approximately 100 years (1895-1993).
• Provides both daily and monthly versions with physical consistency among variables on a daily basis.
• Designed for direct integration with future climate scenarios to create a continuous series from 1895 to ~2100.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided across all sources.
• There is a conflict in the 'last updated' date between platforms (2026-04-09 on datagov vs. 1993-12-31 on nasa_earthdata).
• The license is specified only as 'other-license-specified' without detailed terms, and users are advised to confer with the NCAR VEMAP Data Group for appropriate use.

Provenance

Source

Kittel, T. G. F., et al. and VEMAP 2 Participants. Available from Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center.

Collection Method

Developed by the Vegetation/Ecosystem Modeling and Analysis Project (VEMAP) Phase 2, as reported in Kittel et al. (1997).

Time Range

1895-1993

Freshness

2026-04-09 21:09:53.688085

Geography

Conterminous United States (gridded)