Heating degree day spatial datasets for Canada

Heather MacDonald; John Pedlar; Daniel W McKenney; Kevin Lawrence; Kaitlin de Boer; Michael F Hutchinson

doi:10.1016/j.dib.2023.109450

Heating degree day spatial datasets for Canada

Data Brief. 2023 Jul 26:49:109450. doi: 10.1016/j.dib.2023.109450. eCollection 2023 Aug.

Authors

Heather MacDonald¹, John Pedlar¹, Daniel W McKenney¹, Kevin Lawrence¹, Kaitlin de Boer¹, Michael F Hutchinson²

Affiliations

¹ Great Lakes Forestry Centre, Canadian Forest Service, Natural Resources Canada, P6A 2E5 1219 Queen Street East, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada.
² Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Australia.

Abstract

Heating degree days (HDD) represent a concise measure of heating energy requirements used to inform decision making about the impact of climate change on heating energy demand. This data paper presents spatial datasets of heating degree days (HDD) for Canada for two thirty-year periods, 1951-1980 and 1981-2010, using daily temperature gauge observations over these time periods. Stations with fewer than nine missing days in a year and greater than nine years of data over each thirty-year period were included, resulting in 1339 and 1679 stations for the 1951-1980 and 1981-2010 periods respectively. Mean absolute error (MAE) of the spatial models ranged from 124.2 Celsius degree days (C-days) for the 1951-1980 model (2.4% of the surface mean) to 137.6 C-days for the 1981-2010 model (2.7%). This note presents maps illustrating cross validation errors at a set of representative stations. The grids are available at ∼2 km resolutions.

Keywords: ANUSPLIN; Canada; Climate; Grids; HDD; Heating degree days; Historical; Raster; Spatial datasets; Temperature; Thin plate spline.