High-resolution gridded daily rainfall and temperature for the Hawaiian Islands (1990–2014)

In this work, a distance-weighted interpolation method used to map daily rainfall and temperature in Hawaii is described and assessed. New high-resolution (250 m) maps were developed for daily rainfall and daily maximum (T-max) and minimum (T-min) near-surface air temperature for the period 1990-2014.

Maps were produced using climatologically aided interpolation, in which station anomalies were interpolated using an optimized inverse distance weighting approach and then combined with long-term means to produce daily gridded estimates. Leave-one-out cross validation was performed to assess the quality of the final daily grids. The median absolute prediction error for rainfall was 0.1 mm with an average overprediction (+0.6 mm) on days when total rainfall was less than 1 mm.