High-Resolution Climate Simulations Over Alaska - A Community Dataset, Version 2

Weather and climate variability strongly influence the people, infrastructure and economy of Alaska. However, the sparse observational network in Alaska limits understanding of meteorological variability, particularly precipitation processes that influence the hydrologic cycle. Here a new 4-km resolution dataset for Alaska is made available to the community for investigating recent historical climate variability, and potential changes in the future. The dataset, generated with the Weather Research and Forecasting model, is useful for gaining insight into meteorological and hydrologic processes, and provides a baseline against which to measure future environmental change. The dataset may be particularly useful for applications that require high temporal frequency weather fields, such as driving hydrologic or glacier models. The historical fields, which span 14 years (September 2002-August 2016), are available to the community at hourly resolution for near surface (2-dimensional) fields and 6 hourly for the 3-dimensional atmosphere.