Grid ACIS: Expanding the Regional Climate Center Applied Climate Information System to gridded data sets

Since its inception, the Applied Climate Information System (ACIS) has provided a platform for addressing climate information inquiries and driving climate information tools based on station data. Increasingly, climate data-users are asking for this type of information from a range of gridded climate data sets, ranging from spatially interpolated station data to reanalyses to output from global climate model projections. In response to this demand, the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) has taken the lead on an RCC-wide project to develop ACIS-like products and associated web services calls for a suite of gridded data sets.

In this presentation, we will highlight the capabilities of this new system. In addition to the standard station-based ACIS summary products, which typically summarize time series data at a particular station, the new gridded products allow for spatial summarization. Thus, the gridded version of ACIS allows access to data summaries such a county average temperature, the percentage of a river basin that received more than two inches of rain, or the average seasonal heating degree days in New York State in 2050. Examples of the capabilities of Grid ACIS will be demonstrated in terms of web services calls, its linkage to the drought information tool developed by the Carolinas RISA and applications in the national climate assessment using regional climate model output distributed through NARCAPP.