Performance Measures

The Climate Reference Network (CRN) was established to help detect climate change in the United States. In order to assess the performance of the network in addressing this goal a performance measure (PM) was developed. This PM is an assessment of how closely the current and past configuration of the network captures the "true" national temperature and precipitation signal as defined by an area-averaged time series of annual temperature and precipitation derived from 4000 U.S. Cooperative (CO-OP) Network stations scattered across the continental U.S. The configuration of the CRN for a given point in time is used to select stations from the 4000 CO-OP station network, one station for each operating CRN site (the one physically closest in location), and the time series derived from these stations is compared, statistically, to the time series derived from all 4000 stations. The result is a "variance explained" that measures how closely the "CRN" time series follows the "true" time series.

The application which produces the statistics used to assess the PM is under the configuration management of the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), Scientific Services Division. The current performance measure status documents are available upon request. Contact the CRN Program Manager.