Spatiotemporal trends in temperature and precipitation for Prince Edward Island over 1971–2020

Abstract

Climate change has been attracting significant attention in Canada lately. This study investigates spatiotemporal air temperature and precipitation changes by developing high-resolution (i.e., 1 m × 1 km grid) climate maps from 1971 to 2020. The climate monitoring data are collected and synthesized from various sources, and then used to develop high-resolution climate maps with state-of-the-art spatial interpolation methods. The error metrics results show that the inverse distance weighting method performs the best for air temperature and precipitation and thus is used in this study. Significant temporal trends show that the annual mean temperature increased by 0.03 °C/year in western and eastern Prince Edward Island (PEI), covering 62.75% of PEI area. Similarly, the annual precipitation has decreased by around 4.8 mm/year in Prince County and eastern parts of Queens and Kings Counties, covering 62.81% of PEI area. In growing season, temperature has increased by 0.05 °C/year and precipitation is decreased by 2.1 mm/year in Prince County. This information illustrates the dynamics of temperature and precipitation toward the changing climate.