Comparison of weather data from the Remote Automated Weather Station network and the North American Regional Reanalysis

Beth L. Hall, Timothy J. Brown

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

The North American Regional Reanalysis (NARR) is an assimilated dataset at a 32-km spatial and 3-hour temporal resolution. Due to its completeness, it offers an opportunity to estimate missing and erroneous data from other atmospheric datasets. Based upon multiple data sets including rawindondes, aircraft, and surface weather stations, NARR assimilates this data into modeled output. However, one of the datasets that NARR does not include is the Remote Automated Weather Station (RAWS) network (Zachariassen et al 2003). This is a network of over 2000 currently active weather stations throughout the US operated by federal and state agencies for the dominant use of wildfire applications. Therefore, many of these stations are placed in high-elevation and/or remote locations. The Fire Program Analysis (FPA) system is a multi-agency effort to plan, budget, and evaluate the effectiveness of alternative fire management strategies, and is highly dependent upon historical weather data from fire prone regions. Unfortunately, RAWS data has periods of missing and/or erroneous values for each station in the network, and FPA requires a complete weather dataset of best possible data. In the project described here, the NARR dataset has been integrated statistically with the RAWS data for FPA. Since RAWS was not used as one of the input datasets in NARR, the correlations between NARR and RAWS are not always strong. This analysis correlates temperature, humidity, precipitation, and wind speed data between NARR and RAWS at varying spatial and temporal scales. These are important variables for fire management. The results are intended to be informative on the discrepancies and similarities that occur when mid- and high-elevation remote location weather data are not integrated into, but compared to NARR.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - 2007
Externally publishedYes
Event87th AMS Annual Meeting - San Antonio, TX, United States
Duration: Jan 14 2007Jan 18 2007

Other

Other87th AMS Annual Meeting
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Antonio, TX
Period1/14/071/18/07

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Environmental Engineering
  • Global and Planetary Change
  • Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Comparison of weather data from the Remote Automated Weather Station network and the North American Regional Reanalysis'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this