Professors Burt and Willmott will generate global precipitation and temperature fields on the basis of some 30,000 weather stations throughout the world. They will also devise a new method for estimating evaporation, water transpiration by vegetation, and soil moisture. The resulting data will be compared with existing low-resolution climate data and with predicted values derived from models of the general circulation of the atmosphere. Error analysis will be conducted to make it possible to assign reliability measures to grid point estimates of values of interest. The work conducted with this award will produce values for monthly soil moisture, precipitation, evapotranspiration, and surface air temperature for land surfaces on a 0.5 by 0.5 degree latitude and longitude grid. Such high-resolution data are needed for verification of general circulation models. They are also an important step toward developing the kinds of macro-scale geographic information system databases needed for global environmental and ecological analysis.
