On the Availability of High‐Resolution Data for Near‐Surface Climate Analysis in the Continental U.S.

Abstract

Increased recognition of potential future climate changes has sparked an urgency in understanding the various linkages among weather, climate and sectors of society. Furthermore, the need for improving climate models is also paramount. Meteorological observations are critical for accomplishing both. A deeper knowledge of the origin, nuances and availability of observation-based climate data can lead to better analyses and validations. In this article, we review the suite of current meteorological observing networks across the continental U.S. In addition, we discuss both the statistical procedures that are used to construct climate data products from observing records, and the climate data products themselves. The focus here is on datasets with daily to hourly time steps, with an emphasis on gridded climate data products of spatial resolutions under 15 km. Ultimately, this paper is geared towards climatologists as well as those outside of the climate field, who need data to empower near-surface atmospheric science research at the local scale. Presently, new observing networks supported by massive volunteer communities are potential game changers, yet the public still lacks both daily precipitation data suitable for high-resolution and/or long-term analyses and rigorous validation of high-resolution gridded climate data products.

USA National Phenology Network gridded products documentation

“…The PRISM data resources are among the most renowned and widely applied gridded climate data products (Daly and others, 1994(Daly and others, , 2002(Daly and others, , 2008Bishop and Beier, 2013;Oswald and Dupigny-Giroux, 2015). However, PRISM does not make estimates of error for their products publicly available.…”

“…The U.S. Climate Reference Network (CRN) was created to yield "an unimpeachable record of changes in surface climate over the United States," against which other data sets may be compared and validated (Diamond and others, 2013;Oswald and Dupigny-Giroux, 2015). Because the CRN station data are viewed as the "gold standard" for weather observations, we opted to use data from these stations for validating the RTMA and URMA gridded real-time temperature products.…”

Evaluation of Daily Precipitation from the ERA5 Global Reanalysis against GHCN Observations in the Northeastern United States

“…Therefore, researchers have looked to using gridded precipitation information [2] such as the Daymet Dataset (spatial interpolation) [3], Meteorological Forcing Dataset (observation-based land surface forcings, derived surface fluxes and state variables) [4,5], the Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM; gridded precipitation estimates adjusted by physiographic factors) [6] and the ERA5 Global Reanalysis (hereafter ERA5; [7]) to address the challenges posed by in-situ observations. ERA5 is the most recent global climate reanalysis from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and represents an improvement over its predecessor ERA-Interim [8] in both spatial and temporal resolutions, and 2 m temperature accuracy [9].…”