A long-term, temporally consistent, gridded daily meteorological dataset for northwest North America

A spatially contiguous, temporally consistent high-resolution gridded daily meteorological dataset for northwest North America. This >4 million km2 region has high topographic relief, seasonal snowpack, permafrost and glaciers, crosses multiple jurisdictional boundaries and contains the entire Yukon, Mackenzie, Saskatchewan, Fraser and Columbia drainages. We interpolate daily station data to 1/16° spatial resolution using a high-resolution monthly 1971-2000 climatology as a predictor in a thin-plate spline interpolating algorithm. Only homogenized climate stations with at least 40 years of record are included. Our approach is designed to produce a dataset well suited for driving hydrological models and training statistical downscaling schemes.