Air temperature is a biophysical variable that affects most biotic and abiotic
processes, being essential in climatological, ecological and hydrological studies,and for the evaluation on agricultural practices. However, air temperature
measurements and monitoring in situpresents limitations in remote areas with
limited infrastructure, such as the Patagonian region of Argentina and Chile. The
objective of this work was to generate a reticulated database of monthly, seasonal
and annual mean temperature for Santa Cruz province. For this, 33 available
series of monthly mean temperature (period 1995-2014) were interpolated by using
the geostatistical technique Co-Kriging to obtain a reticulated product of 20 km
resolution. The Gridded Temperature Database for Santa Cruz (GTDSC) showed
the best performance when compared with other available global temperature
databases, both in the annual and seasonal products. Despite this, in the western
region of the province located close to the Andes mountain range, GTDSC showed
the greatest differences in comparison with the other global data bases. CRU had
the best performance. GTDSC is a regional database with good performance that
represented adequately the spatio-temporal temperature variation, with potential
application in ecological, agronomical and hydrological models, in addition to
represent a base time period for climate change studies.