| Summary: | This research looks at the past century of Texas and New Mexico climate in order
to create datasets sufficient for documenting climatic variations. Inhomogeneities in
climate records are defined as variations in climatic records caused by factors other than
weather and climate. While there are indirect methodologies for inferring climate records
such as tree rings and ice cores, it is the instrumental network that constitutes the most
spatially and temporally complete record of land surface climate since the onset of the
Industrial Revolution. A statistical method by Sun and Peterson (2005a) called Inverse
Weighting of Square Distance (IWSD) will be used to reduce the inhomogeneities in
climate records.
The National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program (COOP) network
of stations will be used for this analysis. A subset of the extensive COOP network, called
the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN), will be used as a foundation for
this study. The analysis and resulting datasets from this climatic study show precipitation
trends and periods of drought and will be useful for decisions regarding future policies on
drought. The result of the interpolation process was the creation of several COOP and
USHCN datasets. Several of the datasets were investigated to determine the spatial
characteristics of precipitation over the 20th century in Texas and New Mexico. The
datasets are in good agreement that the most severe drought period of the 20th century in
Texas and New Mexico was in the 1950s. The frequency of pluvial periods was higher
toward the end of the 20th century, with most USHCN stations showing an increasing
trend when a linear regression analysis was done on each station's precipitation data.
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