U.S. Climate Reference Network after one decade of operations: Status and assessment
Open accessAbstract
The year 2012 marks a decade of observations undertaken by the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) under the auspices of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center and Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion Division. The network consists of 114 sites across the conterminous 48 states, with additional sites in Alaska and Hawaii. Stations are installed in open (where possible), rural sites very likely to have stable land-cover/use conditions for several decades to come. At each site a suite of meteorological parameters are monitored, including triple redundancy for the primary air temperature and precipitation variables and for soil moisture/temperature. Instrumentation is regularly calibrated to National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) standards and maintained by a staff of expert engineers. This attention to detail in USCRN is intended to ensure the creation of an unimpeachable record of changes in surface climate over the United States for decades to come. Data are made available without restriction for all public, private, and government use. This article describes the rationale for the USCRN, its implementation, and some of the highlights of the first decade of operations. One critical use of these observations is as an independent data source to verify the existing U.S. temperature record derived from networks corrected for nonhomogenous histories. Future directions for the network are also discussed, including the applicability of USCRN approaches for networks monitoring climate at scales from regional to global. Constructive feedback from end users will allow for continued improvement of USCRN in the future and ensure that it continues to meet stakeholder requirements for precise climate measurements.
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The PHA has been shown to improve the accuracy of anomalies and trends in real data when compared to observations from the U.S. Climate Reference Network.
“The algorithm has also been shown to improve the accuracy of anomalies and trends in real data when compared to observations from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (Hausfather et al. 2016), whose stations meet the highest station siting standards and are managed to prevent changes that cause shifts in the data (Diamond et al. 2013).”
From The Global Historical Climatology Network Monthly Temperature Dataset, Version 4 (2018) · cites this paper as Diamond et al. 2013
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The Global Historical Climatology Network Monthly Temperature Dataset, Version 4
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“…improve the accuracy of anomalies and trends in real data when compared to observations from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (Hausfather et al. 2016), whose stations meet the highest station siting standards and are managed to prevent changes that cause shifts in the data (Diamond et al. 2013).”
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Mukherjee, A., & Sanders, N. (2021) · doi:10.3386/w28987 · Cited by 19 · see citing works
- Authors
- Diamond, H. J., Karl, T. R., Palecki, M. A., Baker, C. B., Bell, J. E., Leeper, R. D., Easterling, D. R., Lawrimore, J. H., Meyers, T. P., Helfert, M. R., Goodge, G., & Thorne, P. W.
- Affiliations
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (US)
- NOAA Air Resources Laboratory (US)
- North Carolina State University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Diamond, Howard J.
- ORCID
- Venue
- Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
- Publisher
- American Meteorological Society
- Published
- 2013-04-01
- Volume
- 94
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 485-498
- ISSN
- 0003-0007 (ISSN-L)
- 1520-0477
- OpenAlex
- W2097434015
- Semantic Scholar
- 8814bc0a5cbef6b3171018d831fa116fdd8b1818
- Cited by
- 415
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 23 · 2025: 27 · 2024: 29 · 2023: 43 · 2022: 36 · 2021: 39 · 2020: 50 · 2019: 31 · 2018: 36 · 2017: 27 · 2016: 34 · 2015: 22 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 8
- FWCI
- 18.71
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (publishedVersion)
- Maynooth University ePrints and eTheses Archive (Maynooth University) (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- Office of Science
- Climate Program Office
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Climate variability and models
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Environmental Engineering › Urban Heat Island Mitigation
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Calibration and Measurement Techniques
- Keywords
- U.S. Climate Reference Network, air temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, soil temperature, instrument calibration, NIST standards, climate data record, long-term climate monitoring
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