The Climate Analysis and Monitoring Program (CAM) at PCIC is a multi-year project under the Climate Related Monitoring Program (CRMP), developed to support the Climate Change Adaptation Strategy of the BC government. The BC Ministry of Environment leads this multi-agency program. The CAM project and its subprojects were founded on the understanding that monitoring changes in the current climate is essential for the preparation of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. Moreover, analyses of climate anomalies are needed to highlight climate variability in the midst of ongoing climate change, or to interpret and attribute extreme weather/climate events. While the existing observational database hosted by Environment Canada is critically important, it is insufficient to define the climatic conditions of British Columbia, characterized by widely varying topography and a scarcity of historical data.
The Data Inventory Project is a phase of CAM. Throughout 2010 and the early part of 2011, its focus has been on the development of an inventory of available weather data collected from regional networks in the province to determine its potential use for climate analysis and monitoring.
The sources for this data were identified during the data inventory project and are the initial elements in the development of the Provincial Climate Data Set (PCDS) at PCIC. In addition to working with Environment Canada, PCIC has also engaged with researchers at Oregon State University’s PRISM Climate Group to obtain and apply PRISM technology to the development of monthly climate maps for the 1971–2000 climate normal period and monthly climate time series for BC using the PCDS.
Methods
The project team’s first task was to establish an inventory of stations and available data from the CRMP BC provincial network. Inventory development consists of five steps:
- identification of station locations and their basic attributes (e.g., elevation) within the nine EcoProvinces of BC (Figure 1);
- organization of existing observational data (transferred to PCIC in disparate formats) into a common framework for access, quality control, and analysis;
- an assessment of time gaps in the data relative to neighbouring Environment Canada stations;
- an assessment of data quality for each network through the application of basic quality control procedures to all variables in the PCDS;
- follow-up meetings with each network coordinator to review the results and ensure that the shared datasets are as complete as possible.
Results
A foundation has been laid for a major component of PCIC’s Climate Analysis and Monitoring (CAM) program. At the outset, seven provincial networks contributed data from more than 1,145 historical observational sites (Figure 1) and more than 612 active sites. In addition, three more datasets have been identified, and historical records dating back to 1917 have been recovered. The observations of daily maximum temperature, minimum temperature, and precipitation will form the basis for the province-wide dataset. This set will be composed of historical data and current observations that will be used to supplement monthly climate records from Environment Canada. The acquired data was assessed in terms of temporal coverage and quality. The quality checking has been non-destructive – suspect measurements are flagged for further inspection or exclusion. The completion of quality control will be conducted jointly with the PRISM Climate Group for the purposes of developing provincial climate maps. The completed inventory of data from CRMP provincial networks will form the foundation for developing a high resolution, monthly climatology for British Columbia, as well as a 50-year time-series of monthly temperature and precipitation, resolved for any point in the province.
Figure 1: Map showing the distribution of stations from the CRMP Network and the count (in parenthesis) in each EcoProvince of British Columbia. The regions are defined here.
Figure 2: An example graph showing the distribution of temperature values after quality control analysis, which is used to detect and flag ‘out of range’ station measurements (depicted as red dots in the figure).