How Historical Digitized Arctic Station Temperature Records Can Inform Environmental Change Studies

Although temperature is one of the most basic of environmental parameters measured globally on a routine basis, acquiring temperature records for analysis requires making choices about sources. Global historical network records and reanalyses products require application of quality control and ingest standards to ensure coherency. In the Arctic where the measurement environment is particularly challenging and temperatures have extreme seasonal clustering, the possibility exists that good data, particularly data documenting extreme events may be excluded based on criteria more appropriate for lower latitudes. For Tiksi, Russia (71.596 N 128.889 E) a particularly valuable digitized historical data set is available. This data set includes 3 hourly data since 1936 of all standard meteorological parameters as well as temperature min and max values from Sixs thermometers. The Tiksi digitized temperature data is compared to Global Historical Climate Network daily data to determine the level of consistency between the 2 data sets especially across data gap periods. It is determined if the existing inconsistencies affect calculation of temperature trends. The data sets are also assessed to determine if the frequency of extreme warm or cold temperature events has detectably changed over the last 8 decades and also compared to long temperature records at Barrow, Alaska which is close to the same altitude as the Tiksi station. A discussion is provided of how detailed single station observations can best be used to improve forecasting in the Arctic region where known deficiencies exist.