A dataset of standard precipitation index reconstructed from multi-proxies over Asia for the past 300 years

Abstract

Abstract. Proxy-based precipitation reconstruction is essential to study the inter-annual to decadal variability and underlying mechanisms beyond the instrumental period that is critically needed for climate modeling, prediction and attribution. Based on 2912 annually resolved proxy series mainly derived from tree rings and historical documents, we present a set of standard precipitation index (SPI) reconstructions for each year (November–October), covering the whole of Asia, and for the wet season (i.e., November–April for western Asia and May–October for the others) since 1700, with the spatial resolution of 2.5∘. To screen the optimal candidate proxies for SPI reconstruction in each grid from available proxies in its connected region with a homogeneous rainfall regime and similar precipitation variability, a new approach is developed by adopting the grid-location-dependent division derived from the instrumental SPI data. The validation shows that these reconstructions are effective for most of Asia. The assessment of data quality compared with gauge precipitation before calibration time indicates that our reconstruction has high quality to show the precipitation variability in most of the study areas, except for a few grids in western Russia, the coastal area of southeast Asia and northern Japan. The full dataset can be obtained from https://doi.org/10.57760/sciencedb.01829 (Y. Liu et al., 2022).