Original scientific paper
A NEW HIGH-RESOLUTION BI-CENTENNIAL (1800–2003) PRECIPITATION DATASET FOR THE GREATER ALPINE REGION
Dimitrios Efthymiadis
; Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Philip D. Jones
; Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Keith R. Briffa
; Climatic Research Unit, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Ingeborg Auer
; ZAMG - Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, Vienna, Austria
Reinhard Böhm
; ZAMG - Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, Vienna, Austria
Wolfgang Schöner
; ZAMG - Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics, Vienna, Austria
Christoph Frei
; Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland
Jürg Schmidli
; Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract
A new precipitation dataset for the Greater Alpine Region (GAR; 4°E–19°E, 43°N–49°N) has been developed. It provides monthly precipitation totals for the 1800–2003 period on a 10-min resolution grid. The new ‘HISTALP 10-min-grid’ dataset is based on long-term homogenized precipitation series from meteorological stations across the study domain and a high-resolution precipitation climatology dataset for the 1971–1990 period. The effective coverage of the dataset depends on the observations available in the station network which progressively decline back to the early 19th Century (from 192 to 5 stations). To aid the use of these data in other studies, an accompanying dataset has also been developed, which provides a measure of quality of each monthly precipitation estimate over the grid: the explained variance, relative to the 1931–2000 (maximum data availability) period. The computed quality score illustrates the comparatively poorer accuracy of the dataset for regions and months with less coherent precipitation fields (i.e., over the Alps and in summer) and when the number of stations is reduced,
particularly before 1840. The derived gridded field has been compared with other independently-developed datasets and is found to provide a similar description of the precipitation in the GAR for places and periods of common coverage.
Keywords
precipitation; spatial interpolation; European Alps
Hrčak ID:
64440
URI
Publication date:
15.12.2005.
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