Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area and Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River - Weather of 2009

Knight, Paul; Wisniewski, Tiffany; Bahrmann, Chad; Miller, Sonya

The purpose of this report is to provide a concise weather and climate summary for the period from January 1 through December 31, 2009 and to place current patterns and trends in an appropriate historical and regional context (Knight et al., in preparation). Weather and climate are widely recognized as key drivers of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, affecting biotic as well as abiotic ecosystem characteristics and processes. Global and regional scale climatic patterns, trends, and variations are critical to the cycling of elements, nutrients, and minerals through the ecosystems and can deliver pollutants from regional and even global sources (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001). These variations and trends influence the fundamental properties of ecologic systems such as soil-water relationships and plant-soil processes and their disturbance rates and intensity. Information obtained from meteorological monitoring will be useful to interpreting and understanding changes in species composition, community structure, water and soil chemistry, and related landscape processes (Marshall and Piekielek 2007). The purpose of this report is to provide a concise weather and climate summary for the period from January 1 through December 31, 2009 and to place current patterns and trends in an appropriate historical and regional context (Knight et al., in preparation). It is our intention that this report will satisfy an inherent interest in meteorological phenomena and meets a portion of the Eastern Rivers and Mountains Network (ERMN) Weather and Climate Monitoring objectives: • Document long-term trends in weather and climate through seasonal and annual summaries of selected parameters (e.g., multiple forms of precipitation, temperature). • Identify and document extremes and averages of climatic conditions for common parameters (e.g., precipitation, air temperature) and other parameters where sufficient data are available (e.g., wind speed and direction, solar radiation). • Provide information on near real-time weather parameters, historical climate patterns, and climate station metadata from a single, easy-to-use Internet portal. To accomplish these objectives, a variety of atmospheric data streams were evaluated for their quality, longevity, and applicability to the ERMN parks. Since no single weather observing network contains all the pertinent measures of atmospheric phenomena to assess ecosystem health, an objective analysis of the data networks was developed and outlined in the Weather and Climate Monitoring Protocol for the Eastern Rivers and Mountains Network and the Mid- Atlantic Network of the National Park Service (Knight et al., in preparation). Through this analysis, a select number of weather/climate observing stations were chosen as representative of each park; these are the primary data sources used to profile climate summary and trends. In addition to a suite of summary tables, graphs, and narratives, we specifically identify a series of key climatological indicators to report status and trends on an annual basis and periodically in separate and more thorough reports.