Climate Statistics and Land-Atmosphere Interactions as Related to Land Use and Land Cover Heterogeneity in an Energy Constrained Climate: Implications for the Future

The Kentucky Mesonet is a great asset for the Commonwealth of Kentucky in a multitude of ways, from realtime storm monitoring to building a detailed climate record. A detailed climate record is essential as causality between observations and extreme weather can be identified, a great tool in an evolving climate system. The climate record being developed at the 80+ Kentucky Mesonet observation stations consists of approximately 75 indices. The indices include frequency, extremes, range, duration, and trends of precipitation, droughts, and temperature. For example, calculations of Warm/Dry days (daily mean temperature > 75th percentile of daily mean temperature and daily mean rainfall < 25th percentile of daily precipitation sum where the percentiles are based on a climatology taken from reanalysis between 1961 and 1990) are done for daily, monthly, seasonal, bi-annual, and annual aggregation periods. Tools will be developed based on interactions with policymakers and stakeholders as they will be making decisions today that impact the region’s main economic sectors (e.g. water, energy, transportation, etc.) as infrastructure erected today will likely be in place when the climate is different than at present. Examples will be provided that sample the different climate zones of the state, relative elevations of site locations, as well as different land cover and land use heterogeneity. Discussion of land-atmosphere interactions will also be provded as well as implications for planetary boundary layer diurnal evolution in future climates.