A new daily central England temperature series, 1772–1991

Abstract

In 1974 Manley produced a time series of monthly average temperatures representative of central England for 1659–1973. The present paper describes how a series of homogenized daily values representative of the same region has been formed. This series starts in 1772, and is consistent with Manley's monthly average values. Between 1772 and 1876 the daily series is based on a sequence of single stations whose variance has been reduced to counter the artificial increase that results from sampling single locations. For subsequent years, the series has been produced from combinations of as few stations as can reliably represent central England in the manner defined by Manley. We have used the daily series to update Manley's published monthly series in a consistent way. We have evaluated recent urban warming influences at the chosen stations by comparison with nearby rural stations, and have corrected the series from 1974 onwards. The corrections do not (yet) exceed 0.1°C. We present all the monthly data from 1974, along with averages and standard deviations for 1961–1990. We also show sequences of daily central England temperature for sample years. All the daily data are available on request.