Coverage of In Situ Climatological Observations in the World's Mountains

Summary

Many mountainous environments and ecosystems around the world are responding rapidly to ongoing climate change. Long-term climatological time-series from such regions are crucial for developing improving understanding of the mechanisms driving such changes and ultimately delivering more reliable future impact projections to environmental managers and other decision makers. Whilst it is already established that high elevation regions tend to be comparatively under-sampled, detailed spatial and other patterns in the coverage of mountain climatological data have not yet been comprehensively assessed on a global basis. To begin to address this deficiency, we analyse the coverage of mountainous records from the Global Historical Climatological Network-Daily (GHCNd) inventory with respect to spa