SECURES-Met: A European meteorological data set suitable for electricity modelling applications

The modelling of electricity production and demand requires highly specific and comprehensive meteorological data. One challenge is the high temporal frequency as electricity production and demand modelling typically is done with hourly data. On the other side the European electricity market is highly connected, so that a pure country-based modelling is not expedient and at least the whole European Union (EU) area has to be considered. Additionally, the spatial resolution of the data set must be able to represent the thermal conditions, which requires high spatial resolution at least in mountainous regions. All these requirements lead to huge data amounts for historic observations and even more for climate change projections for the whole 21(st) century. Thus, we have developed the aggregated European wide climate data set SECURES-Met that has a temporal resolution of one hour, covers the whole EU area and other selected European countries, has a reasonable size but considers the high spatial variability.