Protocol
AUTHORS
Daniel Falster, Ian Wright
AUTHOR AFFILIATIONS
Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, NSW 2109, Sydney, Australia
OVERVIEW
Tool for extracting climate data (precipitation, wet-day frequency, temperature, diurnal temperature range, relative humidity, vapor pressure, sunshine duration, ground frost frequency and windspeed) from a global set of high-resolution climate grids, based on weather stations records taken between 1961-1990. This tool allows you to extract data for a list of site localities, specified by latitude and longitude.
BACKGROUND
The Climate Research Unit at Norwich, UK has produced a global set of high-resolution climate grids, based on weather stations records taken between 1961-1990. These data are available and can be queried using these tools to extract data for a list of site localities, specified by latitude and longitude.
MATERIALS/EQUIPMENT
The CRU_CL_2.0 data (New et al. 2002) is a 10-minute latitude/longitude data set of mean monthly surface climate over global land areas, excluding Antarctica. The climatology includes 8 climatic variables: precipitation, wet-day frequency, temperature, diurnal temperature range, relative humidity,sunshine duration, ground frost frequency and windspeed. The data files provide a list of grid locations with interpolated values. The data are available for download at http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/tmc/
The CRU2.0_data extraction tool is used for querying the CRU_CL_2.0 data set. See the list of atatched files below to download a windows executable or C++ source code file.
PROCEDURE
After downloading the data, use the CRU data extraction tool to extract data for a list of sites, specified by grid location. Input is a file with a list locations in tab-delimited form, which must be saved in the same directory as your program and the decompressed data-files. Latitude is in the range -90 to 90 deg South to North, and longitude -180 to 180 deg West to East, both measured in degrees decimal. Output from both programs is stored in a text file in the same directory, giving monthly averages for each variable.
See the list of attached files below to download the example input file ‘sites.txt’.