DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15481350
title: Monthly values of solar irradiance, cloud fraction, COVID-19 mortality, for European countries in 2020

description: "Monthly values of solar irradiance, cloud fraction, COVID-19 mortality, for European countries in 2020"

 

Authors: Iftime Adrian, Omer Secil, Burcea Andrei Victor, Calinescu Octavian, Babes Ramona-Madalina

 

Corresponding author for this dataset: 

A. Iftime, University of Medicine and Pharmacy "Carol Davila", Biophysics Department, 8 Blvd. Eroii Sanitari, 050474 Bucharest, Romania. Email address: adrian.iftime [at] umfcd.ro.

 

 

 

DATASET:

371 rows, 1st row contains labels; 370 rows with records, with the following fields (columns): 

 

"Country_Code":

ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 two-letters country code (ID variable for the countries)

37 European countries included.

 

"Country" :

Country name in human readable format 

 

"Month": 

Date in format YYYY-MM (year-month).

The month of the data collecting. 

 

"Month_Fct2020"

Month as a string with names of the months (in English) for factor recoding. 

 

"Population"

Average country population in the year 2020 *

 

"Monthly_Deaths"

Calculated total fatalities in that month in the respective country due to COVID-19 *

Note: "NA" - coding for "Data not available"

 

"Deaths_per_1Mpop" :

Monthly mortality from COVID-19  

calculated as the number of COVID-19 deaths per 1 million population of the country 

 

"Monthly_Insolation" :

Calculated Insolation average (solar irradiance at ground level),

in that particular month / country. 

It is expressed in Watt / square meter of the ground surface. ** 

 

"Cloud_Fraction" :

Calculated cloudiness (also known as cloud fraction, cloud cover, cloud amount or sky cover),

as decimal fraction of the sky obscured by clouds (min: 0, max:1), 

in that particular month / country. *** 

 

"CENTR_latitude" and

"CENTR_longitude" :

Latitude and Longitude of the country centroid, for each country. **** 

NOTE: This is identical in every month; 

it is redundantly included for easier monthly sectional analysis of the data.  

 

===========

 

* Computed from public daily data by: 

GUIDOTTI, Emanuele. A worldwide epidemiological database for COVID-19 at fine-grained spatial resolution. Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022, (9). ISSN: 2052-4463.

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-022-01245-1

Note: data snapshot used for  the calculation was on 2025, February 13. 

 

 

** Computed from global data available at:

NASA Langley Research Center, NASA’s Earth Observatory, 

CERES / FLASHFlux team, 2020, 

https://neo.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php?datasetId=CERES_INSOL_M

(old link: https://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php?datasetId=CERES_INSOL_M )

Calculated with a resolution of 0.25 deg latitude x 0.25 deg longitude grid;

 

*** Computed from from global data available at: 

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA’s Earth Observatory,

MODIS Atmosphere Science Team, 2020, 

https://neo.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php?datasetId=MODAL2_M_CLD_FR

(old link: https://neo.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/view.php?datasetId=MODAL2_M_CLD_FR  )

Calculated with a resolution of 0.25 deg latitude x 0.25 deg longitude grid;

 

**** Data derived from Google LLC, "Dataset publishing language: country centroids",

     https://developers.google.com/public-data/docs/canonical/countries_csv