Abstract
Climate indicators are essential for monitoring ongoing climate change, supporting climate impact research, conducting spatial hot spot analyses and assessing attribution questions. These efforts rely on high-quality, reliable datasets that adhere to FAIR data principles. We present a curated dataset of 117 climate indicators for Austria, covering the period from 1961 onward at a 1-km spatial resolution. The dataset includes climate indicators related to temperature, precipitation, radiation, snow, runoff and humidity, with spatial (area means) and temporal (climatological reference period means) aggregations to enable rapid climate impact analysis. The workflow used to compute these indices is supported by a careful technical validation procedure and is designed to ingest diverse climate datasets, enabling the creation of climate indices beyond the scope presented here. Both the dataset and the workflow thus offer a robust, flexible and user-friendly resource for advancing climate research and supporting informed decision-making.
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Data availability
All calculated climate indicators, spatiotemporal aggregations, and generated figures are publicly available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16928609. The source data used to calculate all climate indicators can be accessed through the GeoSphere Austria DataHub, specifically the gridded datasets (a) SPARTACUS (https://doi.org/10.60669/m6w8-s545), (b) WINFORE (https://doi.org/10.60669/f6ed-2p24), and (c) SNOWGRID (https://doi.org/10.60669/fsxx-6977).
Code availability
All code for calculating climate indicators, performing aggregations and significance tests, as well as generating visualizations, is open source and available on GitHub at https://github.com/seblehner/austrian-climate-indicators.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported through the Austrian Climate Research Program of the Federal Ministry for Agriculture and Forestry, Climate and Environmental Protection, Regions and Water Management under grant agreement FO999901443.
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S.L. contributed to project conceptualization, data acquisition and processing, validation, code development and manuscript writing. M.S. contributed to project conceptualization, data acquisition, validation, code review, manuscript writing and supervision.
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Lehner, S., Schlögl, M. Climate indicators for Austria since 1961 at 1 km resolution. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06834-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06834-y
