The objective of this study was to develop a method to provide estimates of daily global radiation as input for the Crop Growth Monitoring System of the European Union, from meteorological observations transmitted via the Global Telecommunication System for locations where sunshine duration observations are not available and hence the Angstrom, or any other sunshine duration based method, cannot be applied. A simple method to estimate global radiation from mean daytime cloud cover and maximum and minimum temperature has been tested. The test was executed for various locations in Europe, ranging from Finland to Italy. Average RMSE and MBE for the comparison between observed and estimated global radiation for the tested locations using the proposed method is 2.48 and -0.25 MJ m(-2) d(-1), respectively.