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

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series mainly derived from tree rings and historical documents, we present a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).
