Development of the U.S. Climate Reference Network

The 1997 Conference on the World Climate Research Programme concluded that ". . . the global capacity to observe the Earth's climate system is inadequate and is deteriorating." In response, the National Research Council recommended the ". . . development, implementation, and operation of climate--specific observational programs." We will describe the development of the approximately 250--station U.S. Climate Reference Network (CRN), which 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 time, we expect the CRN to become a component of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), as well as become a model for future automated coordinated networks to follow.

The fundamental purpose of the network is to provide a homogeneous data set of air temperature and precipitation (and other relevant parameters in the future) that can be used to analyze climate variations and climate change on decade to century time--scales. To maintain data continuity, CRN stations will be located at existing sites of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network that have been carefully analyzed for long--term homogeneity, and rigorous transfer functions will be developed relating the data from the new instrumentation to the existing instrumentation. As an inter--agency network, the data will have application to weather forecasting, agriculture, hydrology, and commercial interests, among others. In this paper, we will discuss the proposed complement of sensors at each site, their calibration and recalibration, site maintenance, data transmission, meta--data, data quality control, system testing and validation, and network deployment.