1961-1990 baseline climate: The file ‘Normals61

1961-1990 baseline climate: The file ‘Normals61.txt’ contains gridded monthly mean values for daily maximum and minimum air temperature and total precipitation for the 1961-1990 period. These data were constructed by interpolating monthly climate data as a function of latitude, longitude and elevation using ANUSPLIN (Hutchinson, 2000). ANUSPLIN uses thin plate smoothing splines as the interpolation technique (Hutchinson, 1995). Any stations with 5 or more years of record were used (Environment Canada, 1994). The grid is 500 arc seconds and was developed using a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, based on the National Topographic Series 1:250,000 topographic data. For details of these particular Canadian applications see McKenney et al. (2001) (see also Price et al. 2000).