See presentation on current progress here [[https://projects.nceas.ucsb.edu/nceas/documents/18]]

I've downloaded and processed the full 10 archive for Oregon and generated monthly climatologies for "Cloud Optical Thickness" and "Cloud Effective Radius". Preliminary comparisons with station data (with a vanilla, non-spatial linear model) shows r^2 values of Precip~OpticalThickness near 0.5. This is encouraging that these data will be useful covariates (along with elevation, distance to coast, etc.) in the interpolations.