HR: 17:05h
AN: A54A-04    [Abstracts]
TI: Gridded Fields of Monthly Temperature and Precipitation for North America
AU: * Vose, R
EM: russell.vose@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA National Climatic Data Center, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801, United States
AU: Squires, M
EM: mike.squires@noaa.gov
AF: NOAA National Climatic Data Center, 151 Patton Avenue, Asheville, NC 28801, United States
AB: High-resolution gridded fields over spatially extensive regions are critical in understanding large-scale climatic variability and change. Gridded fields of monthly temperature and precipitation for North America were recently developed by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). Although they have many potential applications, the grids are primarily intended for operational climate monitoring applications, including the estimation of regional- scale temperature trends and the development of blended tree ring/in situ drought reconstructions. There were two steps in the creation of the temperature and precipitation fields. The first was the development of a high-quality dataset of historical (i.e., weather station) records, which were obtained from three sources: NCDC, Environment Canada, and Creighton University. The station records were subjected to a barrage of quality assurance reviews, such as time series checks for spurious changes in the mean and variance and neighbor checks to identify outliers from either a serial or spatial perspective. State-of-the-art homogeneity adjustments were also applied in the case of temperature. The second step entailed the actual gridding of the station data via climatologically aided interpolation (CAI). Gridded fields of station normals, an initial requirement for CAI, were produced via trivariate thin-plate smoothing spline models. Gridded fields of temperature and precipitation for each year/month were then created by interpolating station-based anomalies via a sophisticated inverse distance weighting scheme, then adding the gridded anomalies to the gridded normals. The efficacy of the gridded fields was assessed using a cross-validation scheme and withheld data points.
DE: 1616 Climate variability (1635, 3305, 3309, 4215, 4513)
DE: 3305 Climate change and variability (1616, 1635, 3309, 4215, 4513)
DE: 3309 Climatology (1616, 1620, 3305, 4215, 8408)
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly