Tales of Two Products: What Can We Learn from NCEI's New Daily Grids and Area Averages of Temperature and Precipitation?

What were the hottest and coldest days for the Contiguous United States (ConUS) as a whole since 1951? Has there ever been a larger area covered by daily rainfall exceeding 25 cm than during Hurricane Harvey? These and other tantalizing questions will be answered during this presentation. Answers will be based on analyses of collections of daily gridded and area-averaged precipitation and temperature that have recently been developed at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Originally created in support of sub-monthly drought monitoring, the two complementary products have many other applications in the agriculture, energy, and climate monitoring sectors, to name a few. The grids were generated by interpolating observations from the Global Historical Climatology Network - Daily dataset to a nominal 5-km grid. The gridpoint were then averaged over commonly-used regions ranging in size from census tracts, counties, and climate divisions to the regions used in the National Climate Assessment and the CONUS as a whole. Public beta version of both products, nClimGrid-Daily and nClimDiv-Daily, are expected to be available by the time of the conference and will therefore also be introduced as part of the presentation.