Development and application of a North American Great Lakes hydrometeorological database - Part I: Precipitation, evaporation, runoff, and air temperature

Starting in 1983, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (GLERL) has been developing and maintaining a historical time series of North American Great Lakes basin-scale monthly hydrometeorological data. This collection of data sets, which we hereafter refer to as the NOAA-GLERL monthly hydrometeorological database (GLM-HMD), is, to our knowledge, the first (and perhaps still the only) to assimilate hydrometeorological measurements into model simulations for each of the major components of the water budget across the entirety (i.e., both United States and Canadian portions) of the Great Lakes basin for a period of record dating back to the early and mid 1900s. Here, we describe the development of data sets in the first (GLM-HMD-I) of two subsets of the GLM-HMD including basin-scale estimates of over-lake and over-land precipitation and air temperature, runoff, and over-lake evaporation. Our synthesis of the GLM-HMD-I includes a summary of the monitoring network associated with each variable and an indication of how each monitoring network has changed over time. We conclude with two representative applications of the GLM-HMD aimed at advancing understanding of seasonal and long-term changes in Great Lakes regional meteorology and climatology. These two examples implicitly reflect the historical utility of the GLM-HMD in numerous previous studies, and explicitly demonstrate its potential utility in ongoing and future regional hydrological science and climate change research.