Monthly surface meterology for Colorado 1895-1997

Description

Source:

These is a group of R data sets for monthly min/max temperatures and precipitation over the period 1895-1997. It is a subset extracted from the more extensive US data record described in at http://www.image.ucar.edu/Data/US.monthly.met. Observed monthly precipitation, min and max temperatures for the conterminous US 1895-1997. See also http://www.image.ucar.edu/Data/US.monthly.met/CO.shtml for an on line document of this Colorado subset. Temperature is in degrees C and precipitation is total monthly accumulation in millimeters. Note that minimum (maximum) monthly tempertuare is the mean of the daily minimum (maximum) temperatures.

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.

Format

This group of data sets is organized with the following 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).

Examples

data(COmonthlyMet)

#Spatial plot of 1997 Spring average daily maximum temps
 quilt.plot( CO.loc,CO.tmax.MAM[103,]  )
 US( add=TRUE)
 title( "Recorded MAM max temperatures (1997)")

# min and max temperatures against elevation

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")