Abstract
Climate archives are time series. They are used to assess temporal trends of a climate-dependent target variable, and to make climate atlases. A high-resolution gridded dataset with 1728 layers of monthly mean maximum, mean and mean minimum temperatures and precipitation for the NW Maghreb (28°N–37.3°N, 12°W–12°E, ~1-km resolution) from 1973 through 2008 is presented. The surfaces were spatially interpolated by ANUSPLIN, a thin-plate smoothing spline technique approved by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), from georeferenced climate records drawn from the Global Surface Summary of the Day (GSOD) and the Global Historical Climatology Network-Monthly (GHCN-Monthly version 3) products. Absolute errors for surface temperatures are approximately 0.5 °C for mean and mean minimum temperatures, and peak up to 1.76 °C for mean maximum temperatures in summer months. For precipitation, the mean absolute error ranged from 1.2 to 2.5 mm, but very low summer precipitation caused relative errors of up to 40% in July. The archive successfully captures climate variations associated with large to medium geographic gradients. This includes the main aridity gradient which increases in the S and SE, as well as its breaking points, marked by the Atlas mountain range. It also conveys topographic effects linked to kilometric relief mesoforms.
Highlights
Climate is a major factor in many terrestrial processes in environmental science and is crucial in explaining ecosystem structures and processes in extreme environments with low homeostasis such as drylands
Climatic effects are often assessed by interoperation of geo-spatial databases, which requires correspondence between continuous fields of a biological or geographical attribute and climate
An archive of gridded mean maximum, mean and mean minimum surface temperatures and precipitation was computed for the NW Maghreb, with monthly resolution covering
Summary
Climate is a major factor in many terrestrial processes in environmental science and is crucial in explaining ecosystem structures and processes in extreme environments with low homeostasis such as drylands. Climatic effects are often assessed by interoperation of geo-spatial databases, which requires correspondence between continuous fields of a biological or geographical attribute and climate This continuity must be both spatial and temporal, leading to the concept of archived time-series. [2]), climate climate before archives consist of sequences of layers throughout the period at the working temporal resolution. (e.g., Global climate archives do exist, but often at coarse spatial resolutions of around 0.5. Emerging economies (where, by the way, critical issues of climatic vulnerability and and natural natural resource resource management management often often coincide) coincide) provide provide less less support support to vulnerability to this this activity, activity, and large regions of the globe remain blank in terms of climate data coverage.
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