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Description:
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This research looks at the past century of Texas and New Mexico climate in order
to create datasets sufficient for documenting climatic variations . Inhomogeneities in
climate records are defined as variations in climatic records caused by factors other than
weather and climate . While there are indirect methodologies for inferring climate records
such as tree rings and ice cores , it is the instrumental network that constitutes the most
spatially and temporally complete record of land surface climate since the onset of the
Industrial Revolution . A statistical method by Sun and Peterson (2005a ) called Inverse
Weighting of Square Distance (IWSD ) will be used to reduce the inhomogeneities in
climate records .
The National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program (COOP ) network
of stations will be used for this analysis . A subset of the extensive COOP network , called
the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN ) , will be used as a foundation for
this study . The analysis and resulting datasets from this climatic study show precipitation
trends and periods of drought and will be useful for decisions regarding future policies on
drought . The result of the interpolation process was the creation of several COOP and
USHCN datasets . Several of the datasets were investigated to determine the spatial
characteristics of precipitation over the 20th century in Texas and New Mexico . The
datasets are in good agreement that the most severe drought period of the 20th century in
Texas and New Mexico was in the 1950s . The frequency of pluvial periods was higher
toward the end of the 20th century , with most USHCN stations showing an increasing
trend when a linear regression analysis was done on each station's precipitation data . |