CRU climate data extraction tool

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’.

LITERATURE REFERENCES

New, M., D. Lister, M. Hulme, and I. Makin. 2002. “A High-resolution Data Set of Surface Climate over Global Land Areas.” Climate Res Climate Res 21 (1): 1–25. pdf

SOME PUBLISHED ARTICLES USING THE CRU DATA EXTRACTION TOOL

Wright, I. J., P. B. Reich, O. K. Atkin, C. H. Lusk, M. G. Tjoelker, and M. Westoby. 2006. “Irradiance, Temperature and Rainfall Influence Leaf Dark Respiration in Woody Plants: Evidence from Comparisons Across 20 Sites.” New Phytologist 169 (2): 309–319.
Wright, I. J., P. B. Reich, J. H. C. Cornelissen, D. S. Falster, E. Garnier, K. Hikosaka, B. B. Lamont, et al. 2005. “Assessing the Generality of Global Leaf Trait Relationships.” New Phytologist 166 (2): 485–496.
Wright, I. J., P. B. Reich, J. H. C. Cornelissen, D. S. Falster, P. K. Groom, K. Hikosaka, W. Lee, et al. 2005. “Modulation of Leaf Economic Traits and Trait Relationships by Climate.” Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters 14.
Wright, I. J., P. B. Reich, M. Westoby, D.D. Ackerly, Z. Baruch, F. Bongers, J. Cavender-Bares, et al. 2004. “The World-wide Leaf Economics Spectrum.” Nature 428 (2403): 821–827.

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