A pragmatic re-engineering approach to extend short observation time series by climate anomaly gridding

For many purposes, including the estimation of climate normals, requires long, continuous  and preferably homogeneous time series. Many observation series do not meet these requirements, especially due to modernisation and automation of the observation network. Despite the lack of long series there is still a need to provide climate parameters representing a longer time period than available. An actual problem is the calculation of new standard climate normals for the 1991-2020 period, where normal values need to be assigned also for observation series not meeting the requirements of WMO to estimate climate normals from observations. 

One possible approach to estimate monthly time series is to extract value from gridded climate anomaly fields. In this study this approach is applied to complete time series that will be the basis for calculation of long term reference values.

The calculation of the long term time series is a two step procedure. First monthly anomaly grids based on homogenised data series are produced. The homogenized series provide more stable and reliable spatial estimates than applying non homogenised data. The homogenised data set is also complete ensuring a spatially consistent input throughout the analysis period 1991-2020.

The monthly anomalies for the location of the series to be complete are extracted from the gridded fields. By combining the interpolated anomalies with the observations the long term mean value can be estimated. The study shows that this approach provides reliable estimates of long term values, even with just a few events for calibration. The precision of the estimates depend more on the representativity of the grid estimates than length of the observation series. At locations where the anomaly grids represent the spatial climate variability well, stable estimates are achieved. On the other hand will the estimates at locations where the anomaly grids are less accurate due to sparse data coverage or steep climate gradients lead to estimates with a larger variability, and  thus more uncertain estimates.