Speaker: Dr. Christopher Daly, Director, PRISM Climate Group, Northwest Alliance for Computational Science and Engineering, College of Engineering, Oregon State University

Abstract: In the late 1990s, the USDA NRCS collaborated with Oregon State University’s PRISM Climate Group to develop digital, state of the science precipitation and temperature maps for Alaska. This was a landmark project for several reasons. It resulted in the first update of official USDA climate maps since the 1960s. The products were reviewed by experts from Alaska and subsequently became the standard source of spatial climate data for the state. In 2009, with support from the National Park Service, PRISM climate products for Alaska were updated to the 1971-2000 normal period. They were updated to the 1981-2010 normal period in 2018, also sponsored by the National Park Service. Now, under funding from NOAA, the maps have been updated to the 1991-2020 normal period and extended into Canada to encompass upstream reaches of the Yukon River. This presentation will provide an overview of the dramatic spatial variations of climate in Alaska as depicted in the new maps and discuss the mapping process. Topics include acquiring and QC’ing the disparate array of station data, the peer review process, and modeling challenges in this remote and complex region.

Bio: Dr. Daly received his B.S. in Atmospheric Sciences from UC Davis, M.A. in Forest Geography from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Ph.D. in Physical Science from Oregon State University. His professional background spans a unique combination of disciplines, including meteorology and climatology, geography, ecology, and process and statistical modeling. Drawing from this background, he has developed and advanced an emerging discipline termed “geospatial climatology,” the study of the spatial and temporal patterns of weather and climate and their relationships with geographic features. Geospatial climatologists seek to understand the features and processes that control climate patterns, such as elevation, rain shadows, coastal proximity, atmospheric layering (inversions), cold air drainage, and others. As a practical output of this study, Daly developed PRISM, a novel approach to the mapping of climate that brings meteorological intelligence and geographical analysis to the statistical interpolation of climate. The PRISM modeling system is now widely accepted as the gold standard for weather and climate mapping and has been cited in over 19,000 publications worldwide. PRISM digital daily and monthly weather maps for the lower 48 states are downloaded from the PRISM website (https://prism.oregonstate.edu) over a million times per month. He is also the author of the 2012 and 2023 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Maps.

VAWS is supported by a grant to the Geographic Information Network of Alaska at the University of Alaska Fairbanks through the NOAA Grant NA24NESX432C0001 Cooperative Institute for Satellite Earth System Studies (CISESS) at the University of Maryland Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center.