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Title: DayRec: An Interface for Exploring United States Record-Maximum/Minimum Daily Temperatures

Abstract

Like politics, you might say that all climate is local. As researchers seek to help the public better understand climate and climate change, a sensible approach would include helping people know more about changes in their own backyards. High and low temperatures are something that all of us pay attention to each day; when they are extreme (flirting with or setting records) they generate tremendous interest, largely because of the potential for significant impacts on human health, the environment, and built infrastructure. Changes through time in record high and low temperatures (extremes) are also an important manifestation of climate change (Sect. 3.8 in Trenberth et al. 2007; Peterson et al. 2008; Peterson et al. 2012). Meehl et al. (2009) found that currently, about twice as many high temperature records are being set as low temperature records over the conterminous U.S. (lower 48 states) as a whole. As the climate warms further, this ratio is expected to multiply, mainly because when the whole temperature distribution for a location or region shifts, it changes the "tails" of the distribution (in the case of warming this means fewer extreme cold temperatures and more extreme hot temperatures; see Page 2, Figure ES.1 of Karlmore » et al. 2008). The Meehl et al. (2009) findings were covered pretty well by the online media, but, as is the case for all types of scientifc studies, it's safe to say that most of the public are not aware of these basic findings, and they would benefit from additional ways to get climate extremes information for their own areas and assess it. One such way is the National Climatic Data Center's (NCDC) U.S. Records Look-Up page. But how do most people typically hear about their area's high and low temperature records? Likely via the evening news, when their local on-air meteorologist notes the high/low for the day at a nearby airport then gives the years when the all-time high and low for the date were set (perhaps not at that same airport). The year of the record is an interesting bit of information on its own but it doesn't do much to place things in context. What about the local history of record temperatures and how things may be changing? Here we present a daily temperature records data product that we hope will serve the scientist and non-scientist alike in exploring and analyzing high and low temperature records and trends at hundreds of locations across the U.S. For access to the data files, click this link to the CDIAC data transition website: http://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/climate/temp/us_recordtemps/dayrec.html« less

Authors:

  1. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Publication Date:
Other Number(s):
osti:1394917; doi:10.3334/CDIAC/CLI.101; cdiac:DOI:10.3334/CDIAC/CLI.101
Research Org.:
Environmental System Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE) (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
U.S. DOE > Office of Science (SC) > Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23)
Subject:
54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Keywords:
record high maximum temperature; record low maximum temperature; record high minimum temperature; record low minimum temperature; United States; USHCN; U.S. Historical Climatology Network; daily data; station data; GHCN; dayrec; Google maps; map interface; record-high maximum temperature; record-low maximum temperature; record-high minimum temperature; record-low minimum temperature
Geolocation:
49.0,-67.0|25.0,-67.0|25.0,-125.0|49.0,-125.0|49.0,-67.0
OSTI Identifier:
1394917
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3334/CDIAC/CLI.101
Project Location:


Citation Formats

Dale P. Kaiser,. DayRec: An Interface for Exploring United States Record-Maximum/Minimum Daily Temperatures. United States: N. p., 2012. Web. doi:10.3334/CDIAC/CLI.101.
Dale P. Kaiser,. DayRec: An Interface for Exploring United States Record-Maximum/Minimum Daily Temperatures. United States. doi:https://doi.org/10.3334/CDIAC/CLI.101
Dale P. Kaiser,. 2012. "DayRec: An Interface for Exploring United States Record-Maximum/Minimum Daily Temperatures". United States. doi:https://doi.org/10.3334/CDIAC/CLI.101. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1394917. Pub date:Thu Nov 15 00:00:00 EST 2012
@article{osti_1394917,
title = {DayRec: An Interface for Exploring United States Record-Maximum/Minimum Daily Temperatures},
author = {Dale P. Kaiser,},
abstractNote = {Like politics, you might say that all climate is local. As researchers seek to help the public better understand climate and climate change, a sensible approach would include helping people know more about changes in their own backyards. High and low temperatures are something that all of us pay attention to each day; when they are extreme (flirting with or setting records) they generate tremendous interest, largely because of the potential for significant impacts on human health, the environment, and built infrastructure. Changes through time in record high and low temperatures (extremes) are also an important manifestation of climate change (Sect. 3.8 in Trenberth et al. 2007; Peterson et al. 2008; Peterson et al. 2012). Meehl et al. (2009) found that currently, about twice as many high temperature records are being set as low temperature records over the conterminous U.S. (lower 48 states) as a whole. As the climate warms further, this ratio is expected to multiply, mainly because when the whole temperature distribution for a location or region shifts, it changes the "tails" of the distribution (in the case of warming this means fewer extreme cold temperatures and more extreme hot temperatures; see Page 2, Figure ES.1 of Karl et al. 2008). The Meehl et al. (2009) findings were covered pretty well by the online media, but, as is the case for all types of scientifc studies, it's safe to say that most of the public are not aware of these basic findings, and they would benefit from additional ways to get climate extremes information for their own areas and assess it. One such way is the National Climatic Data Center's (NCDC) U.S. Records Look-Up page. But how do most people typically hear about their area's high and low temperature records? Likely via the evening news, when their local on-air meteorologist notes the high/low for the day at a nearby airport then gives the years when the all-time high and low for the date were set (perhaps not at that same airport). The year of the record is an interesting bit of information on its own but it doesn't do much to place things in context. What about the local history of record temperatures and how things may be changing? Here we present a daily temperature records data product that we hope will serve the scientist and non-scientist alike in exploring and analyzing high and low temperature records and trends at hundreds of locations across the U.S. For access to the data files, click this link to the CDIAC data transition website: http://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/climate/temp/us_recordtemps/dayrec.html},
doi = {10.3334/CDIAC/CLI.101},
journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {2012},
month = {11}
}