U.S. Climate Reference Network, Part 2: Instrumentation

The U.S. Climate Reference Network (CRN) is being created to meet the challenge of improving the monitoring of climate and the detection of climate change, and to place current and future climate anomalies into historical perspective. In order to meet climate monitoring requirements, CRN instruments must have sufficient accuracy to resolve climate variations in temperature and precipitation. Temporal reliability of the instruments must be ensured to minimize inhomogeneities caused by drift. In this paper, we will discuss the complement of sensors at each site, their calibration and recalibration, equipment and site maintenance, and system testing and validation.