Colorado Monthly meterology 1995- 1997

These is a group of R data sets for monthly min/max temperatures and precipitation over the period 1895-1997. It is created from the more extensive US data record described in Observed monthly precipitation, min and max temperatures for the coterminous US 1895-1997

Data domain:

A rectagular lon/lat region [-109.5,-101]x [36.5,41.5] larger than the boundary of Colorado comprises approximately 400 stations. Although there are additional stations reported in this domain, stations that only report preicipitation or only report temperatures have been excluded. In addition stations that have mismatches between locations and elevations from the two meta data files have also been excluded. The net result is 367 stations that have colocated temperatures and precipitation.

Processing script:

The complete details of how the orignal tar files were processed to obtain the R data sets is in CO.process.R .

R data object

Grab the binary R data object COmonthly.Met.rda
Note the older version of this data object is still posted as: RData.COmonthly.met

In R:

attach("RData_USmonthly_met")

This workspace will contain the objects:

CO.info A data frame with columns: station id, elev, lon, lat, station name
CO.elev elevation in meters
CO.id alphanumeric station id codes
CO.loc locations in lon/lat
CO.ppt CO.tmax CO.tmin Monthly means as three dimensional arrays ( Year, Month, Station). Temperature is in degrees C and precipitation in total monthly accumulation in millimeters.
CO.MAM.ppt CO.MAM.tmax CO.MAM.tmin Spring seasonal means (March, April,May) as two dimensional arrays ( Year, Station).

Quick example using the fields library

Plots are saved in png format as files but this is only done to be consistent with figures that included on this webpage (see below).

Load fields and the CO datasets

Do this just once per R session

library( fields)
attach("COmonthly.met.rda")

Spatial plot of 1997 Spring average daily maximum temps

png("fig3.png",width=480, height=360)

quilt.plot( CO.loc,CO.tmax.MAM[103,]  )
US( add=T)
title( "Recorded MAM max temperatures (1997)")

dev.off()


png("fig4.png",width=480, height=360)

matplot( CO.elev, cbind( CO.tmax.MAM[103,], CO.tmin.MAM[103,]),
  pch="o", type="p",
  col=c("red", "blue"), xlab="Elevation (m)", ylab="Temperature (C)")
title("Recorded MAM max (red) and min (blue) temperatures 1997")

dev.off()

Time series plot of Boulder, CO July and December temperatures


png("fig5.png",width=720, height=240)

# you should check that
#  CO.names[15] is actually BOULDER!

matplot( 1895:1997, CO.tmax[,c(7,12),15],
   type="l", lwd=2, lty=1, col=c("red", "green"),
   xlab="Years", ylab="Temperature (C)")
title("Recorded July and December max temperatures")

dev.off()