Annual and Monthly Spatial Distribution of Rainfall and Average Air Temperature in a Temperate Region: A Dataset of Twenty Years (2000-2019) for Climate Change Studies

Aims: Temperature changes in the air, land and ocean together with the hydrological cycle and
changing precipitation patterns are some of the topics assessed by scientists all over the world in
order to study the signals of a changing climate. As the impacts of climate change are expected to be
noticed both at global and local scale, a dataset of real-world precipitation and average air
temperature at regional scale spanning a period of 20 years is provided and described in the present
paper.
Study Design: Starting from cumulative precipitation and average air temperature data, a set of
annual and monthly spatially distributed maps have been generated in order to provide the scientific
community with regional-scale data related to a temperate climate area.
Place and Duration of Study: Marche Region, East-Central Italy, between January 2000 and
December 2019.
Methodology: We used in-situ rainfall and air temperature data provided by Marche Region (Italy)
Civil Protection Service in the framework of the regional meteorological and hydrological monitoring
network (SIRMIP). SIRMIP network is composed of a mechanical and a telemetric sensing system.
SIRMIP network consists of, among others, 230 rain gauges and 137 thermometers.
Rainfall and air temperature data have been interpolated on a 1 km-resolution regular grid
using Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) spatial interpolation. Temperature data were further
processed through a linear regression using elevation from a high-resolution digital terrain model
(DTM).
Results: The generated dataset described in this paper consists of 240 monthly- and 20 annualspatially
distributed maps of rainfall and air temperature.