Probabilistic spatial meteorological estimates for Alaska and the Yukon

Complex topography, frozen precipitation undercatch, and extremely sparse in situ observations all limit our capability to produce accurate spatial estimates of meteorological conditions. In this Arctic environment, it is necessary to develop probabilistic estimates of precipitation and temperature that explicitly incorporate spatiotemporally varying uncertainty and bias corrections.

In this paper we exploit the recently developed ensemble Climatologically Aided Interpolation (eCAI) system to produce daily historical estimates of precipitation and temperature across Alaska and the Yukon Territory at a 2 km grid spacing for the time period 1980-2013. We extend the previous eCAI method to address precipitation gauge undercatch and wetting loss, which is of high importance for this high-latitude region where much of the precipitation falls as snow.