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New national climate monitoring product: gridded monthly temperature fields for 1981–2010 period for Croatia

Climate monitoring provides users with the information they need for effective planning and operations according to climate variations. This is particularly important in the case of variations in frequency, intensity or location of extreme weather events like heat waves, droughts, heavy precipitation or flooding, because of their often disastrous impacts on the society. National meteorological services provide such climate information to the public and professionals in different sectors, from health sector where information about prolonged heat wave or cold is important to the energy sector where information about the prolonged drought is important for power consumption planning in near or more distant future. With global warming, extreme events, and the one that significantly deviate from the long-term normals, are expected to occur with greater frequency and severity so accessing their present frequency and spatial extent is becoming increasingly important. While it is relatively easy to derive climate information from the national weather network on the observation locations, different methods or background information is used to provide the estimates for the locations where there are no measurements. A range of spatial or spatio-temporal interpolation techniques (splines, regression, kriging, neural networks and machine learning techniques) have been used for the interpolation of meteorological data to produce maps, that is to provide the best estimates of the values away from the observing locations. Also, it has been shown that most of those techniques perform better if auxiliary grids are used. The predictors can be morphological like elevation from the digital elevation model, exposition, distance from the coast-line, but also time series of remote sensed images like land surface temperature or satellite estimated precipitation rate. Following those needs and building on the existing experience in deriving the long term normals for the 1961–1990 in the Croatian Climate Atlas 1961–1990, 1971–2000, the newly developed gridded monthly temperature fields for Croatia for the 1981–2010 period are presented. Another important application of the gridded climatological data, besides estimating the meteorological variables at locations away from observing stations is validation of Regional Climate Models (RCMs). The RCM fields generally represent area averaged rather than point processes so it is most appropriate to validate the model results with interpolated observed data for present climate since such comparison assumes that the observations and model are indicative of processes at the same spatial scale. Hence, there is a high motivation to derive sets of gridded climate data of different temporal and spatial scales for Croatia. Moreover, the intention is to outperform in accuracy, and provide the fields in higher spatial resolution, than available similar European projects.

NCMP, national climate monitoring product, grid, temperature

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