Are there better climate data than Worldclim for Europe?

Question

I am looking for the best available climate data in Europe. Worldclim seems to be the best source of information for global data, but I am wondering if there is a higher resolution (better than 1km cell size and/or 1 month temporal resolution) product in Europe. (I've seen on this site that PRISM is great for the USA, but I couldn't find anything similar for Europe).

EDIT : my purpose is to use the dataset for ecological modeling.

EDIT: if you use another dataset, I am very interested in knowing why it is used instead of worldclim.

Answer 1

European Reanalysis Interim (ERA-Interim) | European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

State-of-the-art 3rd generation reanalysis (1979-present) with robust physics and data assimilation.0.75°x0.75° global grid with 60 vertical levels. Well suited for climate study within the satellite era.

European Reanalysis 40-year (ERA-40) | European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Moderate resolution 2nd generation reanalysis (1958-2001) known to perform better than first generation reanalyses (e.g., NCEP/NCAR V1).1.125°x1.125° global grid with 60 vertical levels.

More Information:

http://www.ecmwf.int/research/era/do/get/index

Data Server (by Month from 1979):

http://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/data/interim_full_daily/

• includes 100's of data layers, too many to list here

Answer 2

An interesting dataset is European Climate Assessment and Dataset (ECA&D, http://www.ecad.eu/) which is offered at approx 25km spatial resolution and daily temporal resolution. The daily maps if temperature (min, mean, max), precipitation sum and pressure are provided as GIS layers. We used them in a series of scientific projects.

Sample analysis: http://www.ecad.eu/maxtemp_EOBS.php

Answer 3

You won't improve much on WORLDCLIM if the input observations are not better. There are much more observations for European area than were included in Worldclim - but these may not be widely available to the public. Reanalysis products from even regional modeling systems are too coarse for your needs and themselves require validation. I am working on comparisons of Worldclim precip analyses with satellite measurement products and ... you have good reason to want more than Worldclim (though Europe is pretty good by global standards). I know these are personal perspectives, but based on lots of analysis of both data sources.