For January ,1997 through September, 2000, we downloaded the daily records from the
National Climatic Data Center
1254 stations fall within 2 degrees of our study area. The number of stations with
data on any given day is:
The initial phase of our processing is done in geographic coordinates.
This gives a bias to the weights of stations to the east or west of a point,
but the effect is small at these latitudes. Subsequent calculations involving
areas all use corrected values.
Max temperature, min temperature, wind, and precip, were extracted from the NCDC
ASCII files and placed in 1056 daily files. These files were converted to
ARC/INFO "coverage" format.
Quarter-degree grids of wind speed were created for each day by using an inverse-distance-weighted algorithm built into ARC/INFO. The algorithm averages all stations within 0.4 degrees of the grid center, but extending the search until at least 3 stations are found.
Temperature grids will be built by building daily surfaces of lapse rate,
adjusting temperature to sea level, interpolating temperature, and adjusting
to actual elevation.
1/17/99
1/18/99
1/19/99
1/20/99
1/21/99