I’m happy to announce that I have made available the HadCRUT4 observational ensemble data as an .RData image for use with R.

These were downloaded from the MetOffice Hadley Observations Web site. Detailed documentation is available on this page, with the particulars for HadCRUT4 documented here.

There is a critique of HadCRUT4 here.

Note that these image files are necessarily very large, being over a gigabyte in size. While that might be unwieldly, I judged having the data within a single R workspace was worth the awkwardness.  I have no trouble using these data on, for instance, a Microsoft Windows 7 64-bit system with a 16 GB RAM.  Most Linux systems should have no difficulty with these at all, given sufficient secondary store and RAM.

• This is a link to the gzip‘d image derived from the ASCII files at Hadley.
• This is a link to the gzip‘d image derived from the NetCDF files at Hadley.
• This is a link to the gzip‘d PDF file documenting the details of the data in the R images.

Standard Disclaimer.  While the data were obtained from the HadCRUT4 site, and the usual care care was taken while constructing these .RData images from the files produced by Metoffice Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, any mistakes are those of the author and are not the responsibility of Hadley Centre or of the Metoffice or of the University of East Anglia. The author declares no legal or warranty obligation for uses to which these data are put, as these are being placed in the public domain in this form for study of climate and other educational purposes. Still, the author is interested to learn of any discrepanecies between the HadCRUT4 data a user might discover and, if there is a mistake, will endeavor to fix it. Please contact the author here.