High temporal and spatial resolution gridded temperature and precipitation fields are required for validation of regional climate models that project future climate scenarios to study climate change and variability for impacts and adaptation across Canada and North America. The grids are also used in hydro-meteorological modeling and related applications used for drought and flood prediction, crop management, management of forest ecosystems, verification of high resolution precipitation products from satellites, etc. Grids of long-term averages are important reference fields in various environmental studies.
Recent collaborative effort between Environment Canada (EC) with Custom Climate Services, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) together with Australian National University resulted in the production of:
- pre-processed daily temperature and precipitation station data sets from 1950-2012, which were inspected and adjusted using quality control procedures customized for gridding purposes (Hopkinson, 2005) and corrected for different definition of climatological day at principal and ordinary climate stations (Hopkinson et al., 2011);
- an automated methodology for gridding daily temperature and precipitation with ANUSPLIN (2013; Hutchinson et al., 2009);
- set of high resolution daily temperature and precipitation surfaces and grids for the 1950-2010 period for Canada on 300 arc second DEM resolution (NRCan, 2013);
- an optimized approach to grid long-term climate averages that maximizes spatial and temporal datasets for best results (Hopkinson et al., 2012), and the set of optimized 1971-2010 and 1981-2010 gridded averages, as well as historical monthly surfaces (McKenney et al., 2011).
The work proposed for this contract involves further update and improvement to the above mention station and gridded data sets, as well as expansion of the grids over North America. The Contractor will be involved in preprocessing of climate archive data, providing expert advice on climatological observations, and evaluation of interpolated fields in the context of their climatological and meteorological validity. Actual computations and runs of the ANUSPLIN (Australian National University Spline) model will be done by the Landscape Analysis and Application Section, Canadian Forest Service (CFS) of Natural Resources Canada.
The proposed contract will be from the date of contract award 05 August 2013 to 31 March 2014.
The maximum budget allocated for this project shall not exceed $42,000.00 (HST extra), (including all labour, associated costs, travel, and subcontractors).
