Rehabilitation and Analysis of Canadian Daily Precipitation Time Series

Abstract

Abstract The goal of this project was to develop adjustment procedures to use daily resolution data to generate high quality time series of precipitation and to perform regional trend analyses on the resulting datasets. A total of 69 locations, most with data covering the period 1900–96 were used. Data availability in much of the Canadian Arctic was restricted to 1948–96. By using daily data, improved corrections to precipitation data, not practical with monthly data, could be implemented. For each of three rain gauge types, corrections to account for wind undercatch and evaporation were implemented. Gauge specific wetting loss corrections were applied for each rainfall event. For snowfall, ruler measurements were used throughout the time series, to minimize potential discontinuities introduced by the adoption of Nipher shielded snow gauge measurements in the mid‐1960s. Density corrections based upon coincident ruler and Nipher measurements were applied to all ruler measurements. Where necessary, records ...