Spatial prediction of climatic state factor regions in Alaska

Temperature and precipitation data from weather stations in Alaska and western Canada were analyzed via universal kriging to estimate mean annual and mean growing season temperature and mean annual and mean growing season precipitation values on a 10 km grid in Alaska. These values were used to produce 35 annual eco-climatic regions and 40 growing season eco-climatic regions for the state, as well as to estimate average temperature and precipitation values for each region. The regions were compared with maximum normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) values produced from Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) imagery. The regions alone can not be used to predict vegetation distribution, but are a valuable new source of information for those interested in parameterizing ecological models with temperature and precipitation as state factor values.