The database is updated until: Feb 28, 2010.

February 2010 - The main menu contains three new items. "Return values" shows maps to evaluate more rare extremes than described by the "Indices of extremes". "Extreme events" provides information about significant events from the past few decades (such as the heat wave of Summer, 2003). "Project info" combines the old project publications and links. In addition, new categories have been introduced and four more indices are available.

All news items

E-OBS version 2.0 has been released. E-OBS is a daily gridded observational dataset for precipitation and temperature in Europe based on ECA&D information. The full dataset covers the period 1950-2008. It has originally been developed as part of the ENSEMBLES project (EU-FP6) and is now maintained and elaborated as part of the EURO4M project (EU-FP7).

Today, ECA&D is receiving data from 55 participants for 62 countries and the ECA dataset contains 12464 series of observations at 3176 meteorological stations throughout Europe and the Mediterranean (see Daily data > Data dictionary for an overview of all available series). Participation to ECA&D is open to anyone maintaining daily station data. If you want to join please contact us.

Meteorologogical observations are taken at many stations accross Europe, each day. To minimize the effects of changes over time in the way the measurements were made, rigorous quality control is applied before the data is used to analyse extremes. Meta data describing the observation site and instrumentation guides this process. Improving the dataset requires continuous effort.

ECA&D has been designated as Regional Climate Centre (RCC) for WMO Region VI (Europe and the Middle East). RCCs are Centres of Excellence that assist WMO members in a given region to deliver better climate services and products, and to strengthen their capacity to meet national climate information needs. ECA&D provides such RCC-services for daily station data and extremes indices data.

MILLENNIUM is a European Union project under FP6. It aims to answer a single question: Does the magnitude and rate of 20th Century climate change exceed the natural variability of European climate over the last millennium? As part of this project, monthly aggregated station datasets for precipitation and temperature indices have been developed on the basis of ECA&D.

Project team ECA&D
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI)

P.O. Box 201
3730 AE De Bilt
The Netherlands
e-mail: eca@knmi.nl
fax: + 31 30 2204614