Historical and projected climate data for natural resource management in western Canada
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Date
2009
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Agricultural and forest meteorology
Abstract
In this paper we present a comprehensive set of interpolated climate data for western
Canada, including monthly data for the last century (1901–2006), future projections from
general circulation models (68 scenario implementations from 5 GCMs), as well as decadal
averages and multiple climate normals for the last century. For each of these time periods,
we provide a large set of basic and derived biologically relevant climate variables, such as
growing and chilling degree days, growing season length descriptors, frost free days,
extreme minimum temperatures, etc. To balance file size versus accuracy for these
approximately 15,000 climate surfaces, we provide a stand-alone software solution that
adds or subtracts historical data and future projections as medium resolution anomalies
(deviations) from the high resolution 1961–1990 baseline normal dataset. For a relative
quality comparison between the original normal data generated with the Parameter Regression
of Independent Slopes Model (PRISM) and derived historical data, we calculated the
amount of variance explained (R2) in original weather station data for each year and month
from 1901 to 2006. R2 values remained very high for most of the time period covered for most
variables. Reduction in data quality was found for individual months (as opposed to annual,
decadal or 30-year climate averages) and for the early decades of the last century. We
discuss the limitations of the database and provide an overview of recent climate trends for
western Canada.
Description
Keywords
Climate normals, Historical climate data, PRISM, Interpolation
Citation
Mbogga, M. S., Hamann, A., & Wang, T. (2009). Historical and projected climate data for natural resource management in western Canada. agricultural and forest meteorology, 149(5), 881-890. doi:10.1016/j.agrformet.2008.11.009