How much influence does landscape-scale physiography have on air temperature in a mountain environment?
Spatio-temporal patterns of temperature in mountain environments are complex due to both regional synoptic-scale and landscape-scale physiographic controls in these systems. Understanding the nature and magnitude of these physiographic effects has practical and theoretical implications for the development of temperature datasets used in ecosystem assessment and climate change impact studies in regions of complex terrain. This study attempts to quantify the absolute and relative influence of landscape-scale physiographic factors in mediating regional temperatures and assess how these influences vary in time. Our approach was to decompose the variance in in situ temperature measurements into components associated with regional free-air temperature estimates and local physiographic effects. Near-surface air temperature data, collected between 1995 and 2006 from 16 meteorological stations in the Lake Tahoe region of California, USA were regressed against free-air temperature (North America
