Generating surfaces of daily meteorological variables over large regions of complex terrain

Abstract

A method for generating daily surfaces of temperature, precipitation, humidity, and radiation over large regions of complex terrain is presented. Required inputs include digital elevation data and observations of maximum temperature, minimum temperature and precipitation from ground-based meteorological stations. Our method is based on the spatial convolution of a truncated Gaussian weighting filter with the set of station locations. Sensitivity to the typical heterogeneous distribution of stations in complex terrain is accomplished with an iterative station density algorithm. Spatially and temporally explicit empirical analyses of the relationships of temperature and precipitation to elevation were performed, and the characteristic spatial and temporal scales of these relationships were explored. A daily precipitation occurrence algorithm is introduced, as a precursor to the prediction of daily precipitation amount. Surfaces of humidity (vapor pressure deficit) are generated as a function of the predicted daily minimum temperature and the predicted daily average daylight temperature. Daily surfaces of incident solar radiation are generated as a function of Sun-slope geometry and interpolated diurnal temperature range. The application of these methods is demonstrated over an area of approximately 400000 km 2 in the northwestern USA, for I year, including a detailed illustration of the parameterization process. A cross-validation analysis was performed, comparing predicted and observed daily and annual average values. Mean absolute errors (MAE) for predicted annual average maximum and minimum temperature were 0.7°C and 1.2°C, with biases of +0. loC and -0. loC, respectively. MAE for predicted annual total precipitation was 13.4 cm, or, expressed as a percentage of the observed annual totals, 19.3%. The success rate for predictions of daily precipitation occurrence was 83.3%. Particular attention was given to the predicted and observed relationships between precipitation frequency and intensity, and they were shown to be similar. We tested the sensitivity of these methods to prediction grid-point spacing, and found that areal averages were unchanged for grids ranging in spacing from 500 m to 32 km. We tested the dependence of the results on timestep, and found that the temperature prediction algorithms scale perfectly in this respect. Temporal scaling of precipitation predictions was complicated by the daily * Corresponding author.0022-1694/97/$17.00 @ 1997-Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved PIl SOO22-1694(96)03128-9Journal of P.E. Thornton et al./Journal of Hydrology 190 ( 1997) 214-251 215 occurrence predictions, but very nearly the same predictions were obtained at daily and annual timesteps. @ 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.

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