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

Abstract

Spatially continuous data products are essential for a number of applications including climate and hydrologic modeling, weather prediction, and water resource management. 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 (Tmax) and Minimum (Tmin) 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. On days with total rainfall greater than 1 mm, median absolute prediction errors were 2 mm and rainfall was typically underpredicted above the 10-mm threshold. For daily temperature, median absolute prediction errors were 3.1° and 2.8°C for Tmax and Tmin, respectively. On average, this method overpredicted Tmax (+1.1°C) and Tmin (+1.5°C), and errors varied considerably among stations. Errors for all variables exhibited significant seasonal variations. However, the annual range of errors was small. The methods presented here provide an effective approach for mapping daily weather fields in a topographically diverse region and improve on previous products in their spatial resolution, time period of coverage, and use of data.