Data Descriptor: A virtual climate library of surface temperature over North America for 1979–2015 Sergey Kravtsov 1 , Paul Roebber 1 & Vytaras Brazauskas 1 The most comprehensive continuous-coverage modern climatic data sets, known as reanalyses, come from combining state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction (NWP) models with diverse available observations. These reanalysis products estimate the path of climate evolution that actually happened, and their use in a probabilistic context—for example, to document trends in extreme events in response to climate change—is, therefore, limited. Free runs of NWP models without data assimilation can in principle be used for the latter purpose, but such simulations are computationally expensive and are prone to systematic biases. Here we produce a high-resolution, 100-member ensemble simulation of surface atmospheric temperature over North America for the 1979–2015 period using a comprehensive spatially extended non- stationary statistical model derived from the data based on the North American Regional Reanalysis. The surrogate climate realizations generated by this model are independent from, yet nearly statistically congruent with reality. This data set provides unique opportunities for the analysis of weather-related risk, with applications in agriculture, energy development, and protection of human life. Design Type(s) source-based data analysis objective • time series design Measurement Type(s) temperature of air Technology Type(s) computational modeling technique Factor Type(s) temporal_interval Sample Characteristic(s) North America 1 Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI 53217, USA. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to S.K. (email: kravtsov@uwm.edu). OPEN Received: 12 May 2017 Accepted: 4 September 2017 Published: 17 October 2017 www.nature.com/scientificdata SCIENTIFIC DATA | 4:170155 | DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2017.155 1