Abstract. A high-resolution gridded dataset of daily mean
temperature and precipitation series spanning the period 1980–2018 was
built for Trentino-South Tyrol, a mountainous region in north-eastern
Italy, starting from an archive of observation series from more than 200
meteorological stations and covering the regional domain and surrounding
countries. The original station data underwent a processing chain including
quality and consistency checks, homogeneity tests, with the homogenization
of the most relevant breaks in the series, and a filling procedure of daily
gaps aiming at maximizing the data availability. Using the processed
database, an anomaly-based interpolation scheme was applied to project the
daily station observations of mean temperature and precipitation onto a
regular grid of 250 m × 250 m resolution. The accuracy of the resulting
dataset was evaluated by leave-one-out station cross-validation. Averaged
over all sites, interpolated daily temperature and precipitation show no
bias, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of about 1.5 ∘C and 1.1 mm
and a mean correlation of 0.97 and 0.91, respectively. The obtained daily
fields were used to discuss the spatial representation of selected past
events and the distribution of the main climatological features over the
region, which shows the role of the mountainous terrain in defining the
temperature and precipitation gradients. In addition, the suitability of the
dataset to be combined with other high-resolution products was evaluated
through a comparison of the gridded observations with snow-cover maps from
remote sensing observations. The presented dataset provides an accurate
insight into the spatio-temporal distribution of temperature and precipitation
over the mountainous terrain of Trentino-South Tyrol and a valuable
support for local and regional applications of climate variability and
change. The dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.924502 (Crespi et al., 2020).