A past, present and future perspective on the European summer vapour pressure deficit

Here, we present the first gridded reconstruction of the European summer vapour pressure deficit (VPD) for the past four centuries (see https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2022-47 for the study). The gridded reconstruction is based on 26 European tree-ring oxygen isotope records and is performed using a Random Forest approach.  Furthermore, we provide summer VPD data derived from 20CRV3 for the period 1836 to 2015 (Slivinski et al., 2019) and VPD data for the historical CMIP6 simulations (1850 to 2014; Eyring et al., 2016) as well as for the future simulations SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios (O'Neill et al., 2016) for the years 2015 to 2100. 

The data is structured as follows:

• VPD_final_nested_reconstruction.nc -> contains the summer VPD reconstruction for the past 400 years
• CE_final_*_.nc -> provides the Coefficient of Efficiency metric for each time slice of the rec. (Nash and Sutcliffe, 1970)
• VPD_20CR_JJA.nc -> VPD data derived from 20CRV3 for the period 1836 to 2015 (Slivinski et al., 2019)
• JJA_ens*_VPD_*_.nc -> contains the VPD for the historical run of CMIP6 as well as for the SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5 and SSP5-8.5 scenarios. To demonstrate the behavior of the model ensemble, the 25^th, 75^th percentile and the median are provided for each simulation.