October 13 , 2010 Daqing Yang, Precipitation observations in Alaska: challenges and opportunities, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Precipitation observations in Alaska: challenges and opportunities

Daqing Yang, University of Alaska Fairbanks

Precipitation measurements and data are essential for regional and basin-scale hydrology and climate analyses and applications. It is a challenge to accurately observe precipitation, particularly snowfall, over the cold regions, including Alaska. The major issues include network design/distribution, instrumentation, errors in data collections, and shortcoming in data processing. This presentation, based on recent precipitation research in the cold climate regions, will review and discuss these issues, with a special focus on the bias corrections of Alaska precipitation data. It will also highlight the emerging opportunities to improve precipitation measurements and data quality over the northern regions.