DEVELOPMENT OF A WEB SITE FOR ANALYZING TEMPERATURES IN MOUNTAIN
REGIONS OVER THE LAST 100 YEARS
HICKE, JEFFREY A.
Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80526
The effect of climate change on humans and the natural environment is a major scientific and
societal concern. Although climate change consists of different aspects, the behavior of
temperature is most certain as a result of high-quality long-term measurements as well as
confidence in projected scenarios over the next century. Changes in temperature have numerous
impacts to humans and ecosystems, including health effects, food security, shifts in community
composition, changes to ecosystem structure and function, and altered species migrations and
ranges. Although mean annual temperature is useful as an index of temperature change,
organisms respond to the seasonal timing of temperature change in different ways. Evaluating
climate change in mountainous regions is particularly difficult as a result of the paucity of longterm stations situated within these areas. An approach to exploring temperature changes,
described in this work, is to aggregate station records over ecoregions that represent similar
ecosystems at intermediate spatial scales. By also considering elevation ranges within
ecoregions, temperature variability over the last 100 years in mountain regions can be studied.
Here I describe a web site designed to analyze temperatures from several data sources, including
US Historical Climate Network and Snowpack Telemetry stations as well as 0.5° gridded data
from the Vegetation Analysis and Mapping Project (VEMAP). The web interface allows a user to
specify either a station/grid cell nearest an input location or an ecoregion (with an elevation
range); the temporal resolution (annual, monthly, or seasonal); and the time period of interest
(from 1870-2005). Plots are then generated showing the temperature time series as well as
diagnostic information about the selection such as the number of stations and their elevations.
Examples of analysis illustrate similarities and differences across mountainous regions of the
western US. The web site can be accessed at www.nrel.colostate.edu/~jhicke/climate_data.