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This research is sponsored by the NSF Geography and Regional Science Program (DDRI Grant BCS-0622894).

     The large variance in the weather and climate of interior North America demands data that can capture extremes at small time scales and thus daily instrumental data become critical in order to thoroughly assess the potential socioeconomic and environmental impacts. High quality daily meteorological data are also of vital importance for documenting natural variability and anthropogenic impacts on weather and climate. Kansas has an outstanding reserve of quantitative 19th century weather data that have not been analyzed including records from early forts, the Smithsonian, the Signal Service, community newspapers, and weather-sensitive diarists. The three major objectives of this Ph.D. research are:

1) To reconstruct the 19th century temperature in Kansas from 1900 backwards by retrieving, evaluating, and correcting a suite of the best instrumental and documentary records of temperature.

2) To reconstruct 19th century precipitation in Kansas on a daily to annual basis from 1900 backwards by retrieving, evaluating, and correcting a suite of the best instrumental and documentary records of precipitation.

3) To reconstruct five severe blizzards of the late 19th century in Kansas by using the reconstructed temperature and precipitation data along with wind direction, wind speed, and barometric pressure data and supplementing these instrumental records with reports from diaries and newspapers.

     The goals of this research are to 1) produce an unbiased record of 19th century daily, monthly, seasonal, and annual weather and climate data for the central United States starting in historical times and running continuously to the present and 2) develop universal methods of daily historical climate reconstruction that can be utilized in later studies. The results of this research will be made available to the public and especially schools for their use in evaluating climate variability in the state of Kansas. The results will also be disseminated in peer-reviewed literature and presented at scholarly meetings.

Doctoral Dissertation Committee: Dr. David W. Stahle, Dr. Cary J. Mock, Dr. Elliott West, and Dr. Malcolm K. Cleaveland