Why Do I Use Only Europe And The US For Historical Temperature Analyses?

I've had a number of people ask me why I focus on the US and Europe with many of the analyses, and I figured I'd explain here.

For most of the historical analyses I do, I use data from Berkeley Earth. It's a high-quality data set, it's publicly available, and they provide lat/lon grids of their data that make it much easier to work with. I previously posted a short tutorial for working with their data.

Due to a variety of reasons, some of their data is only really complete over the past 40 years or so. I've posted a gif below showing how the daily max temperature data become available that makes it clear that I can't give you the daily temperature profile for Indonesia in 1910.

If anyone knows of a data set similar to this (gridded temperature, precipitation, etc. histories for the entire globe) please let me know in the comments. I've found a large number of quality ones for the US, some for Europe, and that's about it. We just didn't have great, daily temperature monitoring everywhere.