The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) consists of 114 weather and climate monitoring stations distributed widely across the 48 contiguous United States, plus Alaska and Hawaii. This network of stations was established and implemented back in the year 2005 by a United States government science agency known as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is referred to as 'NOAA' by those involved with weather and climate research.
The USCRN system is considered the world's gold-standard for the collection, measurement, processing and reporting of weather and climate information.
NOAA is responsible for studying and monitoring the oceans surrounding the U.S. and around the world, the upper atmosphere of Earth, major rivers and waterways within the country, and analyzing and researching the climate of both the United States regionally and the entire planet more broadly. The Climate Reference Network was specifically designed and built out by NOAA scientists and engineers to collect very accurate long-term weather and climate data from many diverse geographic areas across the contiguous U.S. in order to detect regional differences and track how climate is changing over multiple decades into the future.
The main goal and objective behind creating the Climate Reference Network by NOAA scientists and researchers was to be able to accurately measure and quantify long-term air temperature and precipitation patterns across the various geographic regions of the country over many decades into the future.
The weather and climate data generated from the network needed to purely reflect just the actual regional and local climate conditions without being contaminated or unduly influenced by any nearby human activities, infrastructure and land use changes or development that had progressively occurred over time in the areas surrounding the weather station locations. This careful consideration in the siting and placement of the monitoring stations allowed the Reference Network to produce very accurate, standardized, and consistent baseline data that could be relied upon for objectively tracking, monitoring, and detecting the real underlying changes taking place to background climate variables like temperature and precipitation at local, regional, and national levels over long multi-decadal periods of time.
Every individual weather monitoring station that is part of the USCRN is very strategically and intentionally sited and located following strict siting criteria very far away from any developed areas, concrete surfaces, buildings, structures, or other human-built features that could potentially have any impact on or skew the accuracy of the temperature or precipitation measurements. The stations are most often carefully situated in rural clearings fully surrounded by natural vegetation and plant life like native trees, bushes, grasses, and other plants typical of the local natural habitat and ecosystem.
The site selection process specifically identifies locations that have completely wide open and unobstructed sky views and direct sunlight exposure throughout the full day, flat and even terrain with absolutely no hills, slopes or uneven features that could affect or influence the sensor readings, and sites that are very distant from any major population centers or cities so that only the true regional background climate is monitored without distortion.
This very careful and deliberate coordination of the weather station siting as far as possible away from any human development, engineered structures, facilities or surfaces is absolutely vital for obtaining the most accurate, consistent, and representative long-term standardized climate observations.
The weather stations of the USCRN are equipped with three identical sets of the highest quality and precision scientific weather measurement instruments and tools to record and monitor air temperature, precipitation, humidity, and other important weather and climate data variables. Having three replicated sets of the exact same instrument suites provides critical redundancy and backup capabilities in case one instrument set unexpectedly fails or needs routine maintenance, calibration, or repairs.
The three precision duplicated instrument suites are securely protected inside a specially engineered stacked sequence of concentric cylinder shields. This unique cylindrical shielding configuration is intricately designed to protect the sensitive equipment from sun exposure, wind forces, dust particles, rainfall, and other external environmental elements that could possibly influence the accuracy and consistency of the climate readings if the instruments were not properly shielded.
Automated weather and climate readings and measurements are continuously and constantly taken every 5 minutes throughout all 24 hours of the day and night without interruption. This highly frequent data sampling interval provides climate scientists and meteorologists with very detailed, comprehensive, and complete data records documenting the atmospheric conditions, temperature patterns, precipitation levels, and other weather variables for that specific geographic location.
The weather station data is reliably transmitted via communications satellites every hour of every single day, all year long to NOAA's centralized climate database archives for permanent data storage, archiving, and subsequent analysis. Very strict scientific protocols, standards, procedures, methods, and guidelines have been extensively developed and are closely followed for the siting, installation, sensor calibrations, preventative maintenance, and raw data processing of all the stations across the Climate Reference Network.
This comprehensive scientific approach ensures exceptional data quality, consistency, continuity, integrity, and minimal uncertainty in measurements over many decades.
The USCRN system functions as an authoritative benchmark dataset that can be utilized by researchers for rigorously assessing and evaluating the validity, accuracy, and consistency of the weather and climate records coming from the many other public and private meteorological monitoring networks that have been independently deployed across the country over time.
By comprehensively and systematically comparing the data side-by-side from the different networks in detailed data analytics, any potential biases, gaps, inconsistencies, or uncertainties introduced by non-climate related factors can be accurately identified. These factors include issues like station relocations, increasing urbanization, changing land use patterns, varying instrumentation technologies, or differing network operating procedures over the decades.
After necessary adjustments are made to the long-term records from the other networks to filter out these identified non-climate influences and uncertainties, this allows for significantly more accurate, precise, and reliable analysis of the true underlying long-term climate trends at local, regional, and national levels across the United States.
The completely standardized and high-quality data generated by the Climate Reference Network provides vital information that is critical for more accurately monitoring, comprehensively studying, and better understanding historical climate patterns, variability and long-term gradual climate trends across the different geographic regions and sub-regions of the contiguous United States.
The network provides extremely widespread and dense geographic coverage of consistent weather and climate observations from many stations across all 48 continental states, plus Alaska and Hawaii. This broad coverage allows for detailed quantitative analysis of subtle regional and localized differences in climate change impacts and effects at very fine grained neighborhood levels all the way up to broader state, regional, and national aggregate levels based on aggregating data from multiple stations.
The intentionally small compact site footprints and undisturbed natural vegetation surroundings also crucially ensures the climate observations reflect the true regional climate signal without any contamination, distortions, or biases from urbanization, land use changes, or other localized effects that could skew results.
The U.S. Climate Reference Network has now successfully accumulated over 20 years span of continuous high-quality, consistent, and reliable standardized weather and climate data, while continuing to further expand this incredibly valuable multi-decade dataset into the indefinite future year after year. This continuously growing long-term dataset provides critical support enabling very robust, statistically powered scientific study and modeling of temperature, precipitation, severe storm, and other complex weather trend patterns across the diverse geographic regions of the United States over very long time horizons like multiple decades, generations, or even centuries.
As the network persists in steadily collecting additional years of standardized observations, it is becoming an increasingly integral and indispensable scientific data resource for researchers in assessing and detecting evidence of gradual climate changes across the country and for climate scientists developing more accurate data-driven climate forecasting and prediction models.
© Copyright 2009 - 2023 | C3 Headlines | publish date: August 9, 2023 | Original 'C3' archived version
Access to USCRN station climate data
Images of USCRN stations (145 page pdf)