A HISTORICAL-PERSPECTIVE OF US CLIMATE DIVISIONS

The history of climatic divisions in the contiguous United States has been pieced together from fragmentary documentation. Each of the 48 co ntiguous states has been subdivided into climatic divisions. Divisiona l boundaries are now standardized, and a set of climatic variables for time-invariant divisional boundaries has been compiled for the period of record beginning in 1895. This paper documents the origins of clim atic divisions, the computational methodology of an area-invariant div isional dataset maintained by the National Climatic Data Center, and t he strengths and weaknesses of divisional data.