HR: 17:50h
AN: U24A-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Baseline Datasets for the Extratropical Land Areas: What Can They Add to our Understanding of Global Climate Change?
AU: * Groisman, P Y
EM: Pasha.Groisman@noaa.gov
AF: UCAR at NCDC, NCDC, Federal Building, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801 United States
AU: Knight, R W
EM: rwknight@charter.net
AF: STG, Inc., Federal Building, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801 United States
AU: Karl, T R
EM: Thomas.R.Karl@noaa.gov
AF: NCDC, Federal Building, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801 United States
AB: National Climatic Data Center has recently released several global and regional /national data sets that we designated as baseline data sets. These data have several important features. First, we believe that they can be used for climate change studies. This means that (a) these data sets include long-term time series (at least 50 years of data), (b) comprehensive efforts were dedicated to secure homogeneity of these time series both instrumentally (e.g., the same instrument type and observational practices) and statistically (e.g., corrections were made to account for site relocations, etc.), and (c) the data sets are nearly comprehensive (i.e., no simple and/or trivial ways are left to substantially improve the number of stations and/or data availability for these stations in the data set). In the presentation, we shall show what advantages such data sets provide to our understanding of contemporary climate change. Examples will include the hydrological cycle in high latitudes of Northern Eurasia, changes in weather extremes over North America, and precipitation intensity estimates based on daily and sub-daily data for the conterminous United States.
DE: 1655 Water cycles (1836)
DE: 1827 Glaciology (0736, 0776, 1863)
DE: 3354 Precipitation (1854)
DE: 4901 Abrupt/rapid climate change (1605)
SC: Union [U]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005