The LTER Climate Committee welcomes several new members this fall. Johannes Knops will be representing the Cedar Creek site. Vince Gutschick will be taking over from Wes Jarrell at Jornada. Doug Gooding will be representing Konza Prairie, while Dale Robertson—an original founding member of the Climate Committee—returns to represent the North Temperate Lakes site.
Work is progressing on the Analysis and Synthesis Project through which data are being collected from all the sites for analysis and synthesis. Tim Kittel is working on a project which integrates nicely, the Vegetation/Ecosystem Modeling and Analysis Project (VEMAP). As part of VEMAP, Tim has produced a useful data set which provides monthly and daily average values of temperature, precipitation, and windspeed on a 0.5 degree latitude/ longitude grid for the coterminous United States. The data are for the most recent 30-year climatic normal averaging period. There is another set of corresponding data for 2x CO2 scenarios from three different GCMs. These digital data, and details of their accessibility, will be incorporated in our final report of the Analysis and Synthesis Project. The data are particularly useful for LTER regionalization studies.
LTER sites wishing to access these data before the final report comes out should contact Tim Kittel Tim_Kittel@qgate.ucar.edu at NCAR. A second part of this project will produce corresponding data from transient model runs. In addition, the Climate Committee will be helping Jordan Hastings (McMurdo Dry Valleys) to organize a workshop in spring 1996 whose aim is to initiate work on producing a prototype GIS-based data and information system.