GIS-based tests for quality control of meteorological data and spatial interpolation of climate data
Journal
Mountain Research and Development
Journal Volume
29
Journal Issue
4
Pages
339-349
Date Issued
2009
Author(s)
Abstract
Constructing climate layers is more difficult and important in mountainous areas as a result of sparse meteorological stations and complex topography. This requires a 2-stage process: quality control of meteorological data and spatial interpolation of climate data. For this article, unscreened metadata and observed data were collected from all stations in Taiwan for the period 19612002. A quality-control procedure based on a geographic information system (GIS) allowed us to reject 13.5 of stations because of missing or erroneous metadata and filter out 8.3 of the observed data because of extreme errors or unreasonable temporal sequence and spatial patterns. After applying the quality-control procedure, the monthly mean temperature and total monthly precipitation were calculated as spatial interpolation sampling points. We evaluated the performance of 6 kriging-based spatial interpolation methods with regard to their errors by cross-validation. For interpolating the monthly mean temperature, the strong relation between temperature and elevation led us to favor modified residual kriging. For interpolating the total monthly precipitation, log-transformed kriging was chosen for practical reasons (steadier and simpler). We compared our product layers with pre-existing climate layers. The overall spatial patterns of these layers were similar, except for certain extremes in the mountains. Consequently, the GIS-based approaches presented here could help in rapid construction of adequate climate layers for regions with unconfirmed data. © International Mountain Society 2009.
Subjects
Climate data; Geographic information system (GIS); Kriging; Quality control (QC); Spatial interpolation (SI); Taiwan
SDGs
Other Subjects
climate conditions; environmental assessment; GIS; interpolation; kriging; precipitation assessment; quality control; temperature profile; Taiwan
Type
journal article