Observer Bias in Daily Precipitation Measurements at United States Cooperative Network Stations

Abstract The Cooperative Observer Program (COOP), established over 100 years ago, has become the backbone of temperature and precipitation data that characterize means, trends, and extremes in U.S. climate. However, significant and widespread biases in the way COOP observers measure daily precipitation have been discovered. These include 1) underreporting of light precipitation events (daily totals of less than 0.05 in., or 1.27 mm), and 2) overreporting of daily precipitation amounts evenly divisible by five- and/or ten-hundredths of an inch, that is, 0.10, 0.25, 0.30 in., etc. (2.54, 6.35, 7.62 mm, etc.). Observer biases were found to be highly variable in space and time, which has serious implications for the spatial and temporal trends and variations of commonly used precipitation statistics. In addition, it was found that few COOP stations had sufficiently complete data to allow the calculation of stable precipitation statistics for a stochastic weather simulation model. Out of more than 12,000 COOP ...