The Climate of BC – In your back yard

Understanding how climate will evolve at the human scale in British Columbia requires an understanding of the present-day climate at a high spatial resolution. This task is made difficult in British Columbia where topographic (and subsequent climatic) variations are large. With funding from PICS and BC Ministry of Environment, PCIC has created new maps of the climatology of British Columbia that meet this need. The annual and monthly climatology of precipitation and temperature have been mapped at a spatial resolution of ~800 m for the 1971 – 2000 climate normal period. This advance in climate mapping in BC is possible due to improvements to the mapping technology developed by the PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University as well as improvements in the data availability for much of the province. In this presentation, the methods for creating the new maps will be presented including the incorporation of snow survey data, the use of glacier coverage maps, and the large expansion of available observational data made possible by an agreement with BC ministries, BC Hydro, Rio Tinto AlCan and PCIC. In the near future PCIC will be using the BC PRISM mapping technology to create 1981 - 2010 climatology maps as well as a set of time series maps that will show the month-by-month variations of temperature and precipitation in your back yard over the past 60-plus years.

Faron became interested in atmospheric science as a 5th grader. He briefly lost his way in the world of chemistry in which he received a B.Sc. at Oregon State University. Tiring of the lab, he ventured into glaciology and climate science for his graduate career. At the University of Calgary he studied the interaction between climate and a small glacier in the Canadian Rockies. Then, back at Oregon State University, Faron investigated the interactions between the Pacific Ocean and the glaciers of western North America on time scales ranging from the most recent ice age to the past hundred years.

At the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium Faron works as a climatologist and strives to paint a picture of the present-day and ever evolving climate of British Columbia. His current projects include maintaining the provincial climate dataset, mapping the climate of BC with the Parameter Regression on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM), an investigating high-impact weather events and their relation to climate normals.