Daily maximum VPD - supporting data for Jain et al. 2021, Nature Climate Change

Global daily maximum Vapour Pressure Deficit (VPD) for 1979-2020 at 0.25 deg resolution. This data supports the analysis in "Observed increases in extreme fire weather driven by atmospheric humidity and temperature", Jain et al. 2021, accepted for publication in Nature Climate Change.

VPD was calculated using the hourly ERA5 2m temperature and 2m dewpoint temperature using the Alduchov and Eskridge (1996) approximation as implemented in the R package ‘bigleaf’ (Knauer et al. 2018).

Variables were processed using inputs from the ERA5 Reanalysis (hourly surface data from 1979–2020, available from https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/dataset/reanalysis-era5-single-levels?tab=overview). 

References

Alduchov, O. A. & Eskridge, R. E., 1996: Improved Magnus form approximation of saturation vapor pressure. Journal of Applied Meteorology, 35, 601-609

Knauer, J., El-Madany, T. S., Zaehle, S., & Migliavacca, M. (2018). Bigleaf—An R package for the calculation of physical and physiological ecosystem properties from eddy covariance data. PloS one, 13(8), e0201114.