Estimation of Fine-Scale Daily Temperature with 30 m-Resolution Using PRISM

This study estimates and evaluates the daily January temperature from 2003 to 2012 with 30 m-resolution over South Korea, using a modified Parameter-elevation Regression on Independent Slopes Model (K-PRISM). Several factors in K-PRISM are also adjusted to 30 m grid spacing and daily time scales. The performance of K-PRISM is validated in terms of bias, root mean square error (RMSE), and correlation coefficient (Corr), and is then compared with that of inverse distance weighting (IDW) and hypsometric methods (HYPS). In estimating the temperature over Jeju island, K-PRISM has the lowest bias (-0.85) and RMSE (1.22), and the highest Corr (0.79) among the three methods. It captures the daily variation of observation, but tends to underestimate due to a high-discrepancy in mean altitudes between the observation stations and grid points of the 30 m topography. The temperature over South Korea derived from K-PRISM represents a detailed spatial pattern of the observed temperature, but generally tends to underestimate with a mean bias of -0.45. In bias terms, the estimation ability of K-PRISM differs between grid points, implying that care should be taken when dealing with poor skill area. The study results demonstrate that K-PRISM can reasonably estimate 30 m-resolution temperature over South Korea, and reflect topographically diverse signals with detailed structure features.