Trends in 1970-2005 California Surface Temperatures and Energy Usage for Heating and Cooling: Observations and Simulations

摘要

The current study is a continuation of work by this group to determine 1970-2005 trends of JJA 2-m T_(max)-values in two coastal California air basins: SFBA and SoCAB. The previous efforts used COOP temperature data to document cooling in low-elevation coastal-areas open to marine air penetration and warming at inland areas and at higher elevation coastal sites. It was thus hypothesized that the coastal-cooling was due to (as a "reverse reaction") global-warming of inland areas, which resulted in increased sea breeze flow activity. The previous results also showed that low-elevation coastal-stations showed decreasing summer CDD-values consistent with their falling T_(max) values, while most inland and high-elevation stations showed even larger increasing values consistent with GHG warming. Peak summer peak electricity-usage trends also showed coastal sites with decreased values, consistent with the marine-influence. The current work extended the above analysis of the COOP T_(max)-trends to the more QA-ed HCN data to determine if differences in JJA 1970-2005 T_(max)-trends between the two data sets are small enough to make continued use of the more numerous COOP data tenable.