Climate Grid Analysis Toolset - Tools for Assessing Regional Climatological Trends - Standard Operating Procedure

Sherrill, Kirk; Frakes, Brent

Increasingly, land managers recognize the need for using historical climatic data to inform management decisions. Additionally, given anticipated climatic change, having baseline knowledge of historical climatic conditions is essential for understating potential implications of future climatic change. While most managers rely on point-based observations, stations are often few in number and not representative of the entire park. Gridded datasets, including PRISM and SNODAS, are derived from weather observations, are spatially continuous (4km and 1km resolutions), and spatially and temporally extensive across the contiguous United States. The Climate Grid Analysis Toolset (CGAT) is a suite of GIS Python scripts developed to facilitate efficient analysis of PRISM and SNODAS geospatial climatic datasets. Respectively CGAT performs three analyses for user-defined spatial and temporal ranges (1) cell-based average or totals, (2) percentile calculation, and (3) user-defined zonal statistics. Overall, CGAT is intended to be a tool which facilitates the use of the highly relevant and information rich PRISM and SNODAS datasets. The CGAT suite is packaged as two sets of python scripts requiring only basic understanding of python/computer programming, and a moderate level of proficiency in GIS.

Climate Grid Analysis Toolset - Tools for Assessing Regional Climatological Trends - Standard Operating Procedure

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