250 years of daily weather: Temperature and precipitation fields for Switzerland since 1763.

Climate reconstructions give insights in monthly and seasonal climate variability of the past few hundred years. However, for understanding past extreme weather events and for relating them to impacts, for example through crop yield simulations or hydrological modelling, reconstructions on a weather time scale are needed. Here, we present a data set of 250 years of daily temperature and precipitation fields for Switzerland for 1763 to 2020. The data set was reconstructed with the analogue resampling method which resamples meteorological fields for a historical period based on the most similar day in a reference period. These fields are subsequently improved with data assimilation for temperature and bias correction for precipitation. Even for an early period prior to 1800 with scarce data availability, we found good validation results for the temperature reconstruction especially in the Swiss Plateau. For the precipitation reconstruction, skills are considerably lower, which can be related to the few precipitation measurements available and the heterogeneous nature of precipitation. By means of a case study on the wet and cold years from 1769 to 1772, which triggered wide-spread famine across Europe, we show that this dataset allows more detailed analyses than hitherto possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]