A new paper on mapping daily air temperature was recently published by Dr. Keri Kodama, an East-West Center Fellow and WRRC Affiliate Faculty, and other researchers at the University of Hawai'i. The paper introduces a piecewise linear regression model used to produce high-resolution near-surface air temperature maps for the State of Hawaiʻi for a 32-year period (1990–2021), making it the most up-to-date record of gridded temperature for Hawai'i. Creating daily air temperature maps for Hawai'i comes with numerous challenges due to steep changes in terrain, and the relatively limited availability of weather data measurements on which the maps are based. To account for these challenges, the daily air temperature maps were modeled based on other variables physically linked to temperature, such as elevation or rainfall, which were used as independent variables to predict the temperature values. It was found that the simplest model using only elevation as the predictor was the most efficient combination with respect to balancing lower prediction errors with model complexity. The maps produced by the methods in this paper will act as a valuable resource for scientific research, resource management, and environmental education and awareness.
View the full paper at: https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EA002851
Kodama, K. M., Kourkchi, E., Longman, R. J., Lucas, M. P., Bateni, S. M., Huang, Y.-F., et al. (2024). Mapping daily air temperature over the Hawaiian Islands from 1990 to 2021 via an optimized piecewise linear regression technique. Earth and Space Science, 11, e2023EA002851. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023EA002851