Open AccessEstimating precipitation normals for USCRN stations
Author(s) -
Sun Bomin,
Peterson Thomas C.
Publication year - 2006
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: atmospheres
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.67
H-Index - 298
eISSN - 2156-2202
pISSN - 0148-0227
DOI - 10.1029/2005jd006245
Subject(s) - precipitation , weighting , environmental science , estimation , national weather service , meteorology , weather station , inverse distance weighting , climatology , statistics , geology , mathematics , geography , engineering , medicine , systems engineering , multivariate interpolation , bilinear interpolation , radiology
Normals estimation in this study is based on the fact that monthly precipitation anomalies at any target location are similar to those of neighboring stations. Precipitation normals have been generated for stations of the newly developed U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) by using data from this network and 4629 stations of the National Weather Service Cooperative Station network (COOP). This analysis evaluated several variations of estimation approaches. The best method that was used in USCRN normals estimation was one that included the use of monthly departure data from ∼11 neighboring COOP stations (within ∼78 km of a USCRN station), and a weighting scheme that used the inverse square difference in monthly precipitation totals between the COOP and USCRN stations. When the estimated normals are based on a few years of data (e.g., 3 years of data), their errors are about 9–12% of true normals, and are about 19–28% of the typical magnitude of year‐to‐year variability. This suggests that these estimated USCRN normals can be useful in climate monitoring and assessment.