Identification

Title

Gridded ensemble precipitation and temperature estimates for the contiguous United States

Abstract

Gridded precipitation and temperature products are inherently uncertain because of myriad factors, including interpolation from a sparse observation network, measurement representativeness, and measurement errors. Generally uncertainty is not explicitly accounted for in gridded products of precipitation or temperature; if it is represented, it is often included in an ad hoc manner. A lack of quantitative uncertainty estimates for hydrometeorological forcing fields limits the application of advanced data assimilation systems and other tools in land surface and hydrologic modeling. This study develops a gridded, observation-based ensemble of precipitation and temperature at a daily increment for the period 1980–2012 for the conterminous United States, northern Mexico, and southern Canada. This allows for the estimation of precipitation and temperature uncertainty in hydrologic modeling and data assimilation through the use of the ensemble variance. Statistical verification of the ensemble indicates that it has generally good reliability and discrimination of events of various magnitudes but has a slight wet bias for high threshold events (>50 mm). The ensemble mean is similar to other widely used hydrometeorological datasets but with some important differences. The ensemble product produces a more realistic occurrence of precipitation statistics (wet day fraction), which impacts the empirical derivation of other fields used in land surface and hydrologic modeling. In terms of applications, skill in simulations of streamflow in 671 headwater basins is similar to other coarse-resolution datasets. This is the first version, and future work will address temporal correlation of precipitation anomalies, inclusion of other data streams, and examination of topographic lapse rate choices.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7wh2rf2

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2015-12-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

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name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright 2015 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact