A new U.S. Climate Atlas

The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is currently developing a new Climate Atlas of the United States. The purpose of this Atlas is to depict the climate of the United States in terms of the distribution and variation of major climatic elements. The Climate Atlas is intended to meet the needs for climatic information from commercial, industrial, agricultural, research, and educational institutions, as well as from the general public. The new atlas will replace the current Climatic Atlas of the United States which was published in 1968 and is now very much out of date. Data used for this publication were from the period 1931-1960. It was a very labor intensive and subjective effort to hand contour nearly 200 maps. Today, the technology exists to generate many of the required maps using automated techniques and easy to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The analytical model, PRISM (Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model) which was developed at the Oregon Climate Service (OCS) at Oregon State University, is being used to generate over 300 different map products. Most atlas products are derived from the 1961-1990 period of record.

The Climate Atlas will be available on CD-ROM later this summer. This presentation will discuss the methodology used to generate the map products and a demo of the CD-ROM product will be given.