Time Series

111-Year High-Resolution Monthly Climate Time Series for the Conterminous United States

This data set is unprecedented in its combination of high quality, century-long temporal extent, and fine spatial detail. The gridded settime series of monthly and annual minimum and maximum temperature and precipitation spans the years 1895-2006 on a 1.25-min (approximately 2-km) grid over the conterminous United States, for a total of 1430 grids per climate element.

The data set was created using the PRISM climate mapping system. For the years 1895-1996, a 10,000-station, a serially complete setstation data base (Nychka et al., 2003) of observed precipitation and temperature supplied the point input, and a 1.25-min digital elevation model (DEM) served as the predictor grid for the PRISM climate-elevation regressions. From 1997 to the present, a non-infilled station data set was used as point input, and a monthly 1971-2000 mean climatological grid (created with PRISM) was used as the predictor grid; this is referred to climatologically-aided interpolation (CAI).

This time-series data set enables users to perform a wide variety of analyses not possible using long-term climate averages, including:

• Transient ecological and natural resource modeling for use in global change assessment;
• Analysis of local and regional climate variations;
• Analysis of frequency, duration, and spatial patterns of extreme climatological events; and
• Investigation of relationships between climatological variability and large-scale forcing mechanisms (e.g., ENSO or QBO).

Availability:

The time series is available by decade for any state, region, or for the entire conterminous U.S.

Contact us for information and pricing.

For more details, see the metadata.

References:
Johns, C.J., D. Nychka, T.G.F. Kittel, and C. Daly. 2003. Infilling sparse records of spatial fields. Journal of the American Statistical Association 98(464):796-806.