Improved Historical Temperature and Precipitation Time Series for U.S. Climate Divisions

This paper describes an improved edition of the climate division dataset for the conterminous United States (i.e., version 2). The first improvement is to the input data, which now include additional station networks, quality assurance reviews, and temperature bias adjustments. The second improvemen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of applied meteorology and climatology 2014-05, Vol.53 (5), p.1232-1251
Main Authors: Vose, Russell S., Applequist, Scott, Squires, Mike, Durre, Imke, Menne, Matthew J., Williams, Claude N., Fenimore, Chris, Gleason, Karin, Arndt, Derek
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Climate
Climate change
Climate monitoring
Climatology
Coolers
Data smoothing
Datasets
Division
Divisions
Drought
Global climate models
Interpolation
Meteorology
Meteors
Mountain regions
Networks
Precipitation
Quality assurance
Rain
Temperature
Topographical elevation
Trends
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Summary:This paper describes an improved edition of the climate division dataset for the conterminous United States (i.e., version 2). The first improvement is to the input data, which now include additional station networks, quality assurance reviews, and temperature bias adjustments. The second improvement is to the suite of climatic elements, which now includes both maximum and minimum temperatures. The third improvement is to the computational approach, which now employs climatologically aided interpolation to address topographic and network variability. Version 2 exhibits substantial differences from version 1 over the period 1895–2012. For example, divisional averages in version 2 tend to be cooler and wetter, particularly in mountainous areas of the western United States. Division-level trends in temperature and precipitation display greater spatial consistency in version 2. National-scale temperature trends in version 2 are comparable to those in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network whereas version 1 exhibits less warming as a result of historical changes in observing practices. Divisional errors in version 2 are likely less than 0.5°C for temperature and 20mmfor precipitation at the start of the record, falling rapidly thereafter. Overall, these results indicate that version 2 can supersede version 1 in both operational climate monitoring and applied climatic research.
ISSN:1558-8424
1558-8432
DOI:10.1175/jamc-d-13-0248.1