Development of a longterm dataset of solid/liquid precipitation

Solid precipitation (mainly snow, but snow and ice pellets or hail as well), is an important parameter for climate studies. But as this parameter usually is not available operationally before the second part of the 20th century and nowadays is not reported by automatic stations, information usable for long term climate studies is rare. Therefore a proxy for the fraction of solid precipitation based on a nonlinear relationship between the percentage of solid precipitation and monthly mean temperature was developed for the Greater Alpine Region of Europe and applied to the existing longterm high resolution temperature and precipitation grids (5 arcmin). In this paper the method is introduced and some examples of the resulting datasets available at monthly resolution for 1800–2003 are given.