Reconciling precipitation trends in Alaska: 2. Gridded data analyses

There is a great deal of interest in whether and how Alaska’s precipitation is changing but little agreement in the existing peer-reviewed literature. To provide insight on this question, we have selected three commonly used 0.5° resolution gridded precipitation products that have long-term monthly data coverage (Climatic Research Unit TS3.10.1, Global Precipitation Climatology Centre Full Data Reanalysis version 5, and University of Delaware version 2.01) and evaluated their homogeneity and trends with multiple methods over two periods, 1950-2008 and 1980-2008. All three data sets displayed common broadscale features of Alaska’s precipitation climatology, but there were substantial differences between them in terms of average precipitation amount and interannual variability. Temporal inhomogeneity was a significant concern over Alaska in gridded precipitation products, as it was in the state’s coastal weather stations. Although underlying station inhomogeneities were inherited to some extent by all of the gridded data sets, differences in data set construction contributed to dissimilarities in inhomogeneity, as well. There were contrasts in trends between the two time periods, and some minor discrepancies occurred as a function of the trend detection method, but the main disparities stemmed from choice of data set. Indeed, there were large areas where these data sets disagreed on both the sign and significance of precipitation trends. Until further analysis can resolve these differences, researchers using gridded precipitation data or evaluating studies based on such data should interpret results with extreme caution.

Citation

McAfee, S. A., G. Guentchev, J. Eischeid. 2014. Reconciling precipitation trends in Alaska: 2. Gridded data analyses. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. 119(24): 13820-13837. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JD022461/abstract. DOI: 10.1002/2014JD022461.