Weather and Climate Inventory, Klamath Network, National Park Service, 2007
5.0. Conclusions and Recommendations
5.2. Spatial Variations in Mean Climate
With local variations over short horizontal and vertical distances, topography introduces considerable fine-scale structure to mean climate (temperature and precipitation) within the KLMN park units. Nearer to the coast, severe coast-interior gradients in temperature over short distances are also common. Issues encountered in mapping mean climate are discussed in Appendix D and in Redmond et al. (2005).
For areas where new stations will be installed, if only a few new stations will be emplaced, the primary goal should be overall characterization of the main climate elements (temperature and precipitation and their joint relative, snow). This level of characterization generally requires that (a) stations should not be located in deep valley bottoms (cold air drainage pockets) or near excessively steep slopes and (b) stations should be distributed spatially in the major biomes of each park. If such stations already are present in the vicinity, then additional stations would be best used for two important and somewhat competing purposes: (a) add redundancy as backup for loss of data from current stations (or loss of the physical stations) or (b) provide added information on spatial heterogeneity in climate arising from topographic diversity.
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