Introductory words:
Climate change and its impact
assessment has strike through a great attention these days, especially after wining the Nobel peace prize in 2007 by AL Gores team with IPCC. Huge
number of universities and research organizations started working on climate
impact assessment. Like geographic data, climatic data’s are not as straight
forward to extract from online resources. Various reasons involved for this
problem, most often climatic data’s are uploaded in gridded points with various
temporal and spatial scale. Therefore,
in this post we are going to see where we can get online data for climatic
research and how we can utilize them. One more time all those data’s are
completely” FREE OF CHARGE”
[1] National Climatic
Data Center, USA (NCDC)
National climatic data center for
USA provides climatic data on various spatial and temporal scales for entire
globe [1A]. NCDC is the world's largest active archive of weather data. NCDC
produces numerous climate publications and responds to data requests from all
over the world. NCDC operates the World Data Center for Meteorology which is
co-located at NCDC in Asheville, North Carolina, and the World Data Center for
Paleoclimatology which is located in Boulder, Colorado. Here we will be
focusing time series in daily time step. It is to be noted that there are lot
of variables available in the website but we will be focusing precipitation
temperature (min and max) for this specific post. We will only look at Summary of the Day) [1B]. Summary of the Day (Office of Hydrology
Format) is historical data set DSI-9655 archived at the National Climatic Data
Center (NCDC). The Office of Hydrology (O/H) format was designed for use in
implementing the National Weather Service River Forecast Service (NWSRFS)
nationwide, and for calibration of hydrologic models. Parameters for these
summaries of the day data set include: temperature, precipitation, winds,
surface pressure, evaporation, and snow depth. The period of record is 1948-1976.
2. Precipitation data from TRMM website
The Tropical Rainfall Measuring
Mission (TRMM) is a joint mission between NASA and the Japan Aerospace
Exploration Agency (JAXA) designed to monitor and study tropical rainfall A
good number of researches have been done to assess the relativity of TRMM data
for and found reliable for data sparse region, together with that a large no of
studies applied TRMM data for various purpose among them, development of
agricultural information system for crop production and irrigation need . The
Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission aims to monitor tropical and subtropical
precipitation and to estimate its associated latent heating (GES DISC, 2010).
The daily product TRMM 3B42 was used in this study. The purpose of the 3B42
algorithm is 5 to produce TRMM-adjusted merged-infrared (IR) precipitation and
root-mean-square (RMS) precipitation-error estimates. The version 3B42 has a
3-hourly temporal resolution and a 0.25_ by 0.25_ spatial resolution. The
spatial coverage extends from 50_ S to 50_ N and 0_ to 360_ E. The temporal
scale considered for this video clip is for daily.
Citations:
[2A] TRMM website link
3. Working with netCDF data
NetCDF is a data abstraction for array-oriented data access and a
software library that provides a concrete implementation of the
interfaces that support that abstraction [3A]. The implementation provides
a machine-independent format for representing arrays. Although the
netCDF file format is hidden below the interfaces, some understanding
of the current implementation and associated file structure may help
to make clear why some netCDF operations are more expensive than
others.For a detailed description of the netCDF format, see File Structure and Performance. Knowledge of the format is not needed for reading
and writing netCDF data or understanding most efficiency
issues. Programs that use only the documented interfaces and that make
no assumptions about the format will continue to work even if the
netCDF format is changed in the future, because any such change will
be made below the documented interfaces and will support earlier
versions of the netCDF file format.ArcGIS and MATLAB has in built library for dealing with netCDF files [3B][3C].
Citations:
[3A] NetCDF in wikipedia
4. Climatic data for Europe [PRUDENCE Project]
PRUDENCE stands for Prediction of
Regional Scenarios and Uncertainties for Defining European Climate Change Risks
and Effects (Christensen et al. 2002) [4A]. A large number of decision making process
has been done with the climate model generated variables [4B], among them Schelali et
al (2007)[4C] studied hydropower influence. Beniston et al (2010) studied impact assessment of climate change on mountainous watershed due to prevailing climate . The
main objective of the PRUDENCE project was to provide high resolution climate
change scenarios for Europe at the end of the twenty-first century by means of
dynamical downscaling (regional climate modeling) of global climate
simulations. Prudence project provides two time slices one called control period with the time series of 1960-1990 and the other one is scenario period 2070-2100.
Citations:
In the next post we will see how to build an open source hydrological model name SWAT with all the Geographic and climatic data obtained from various sources. So please keep tuned.
Acknowledgement: Support from Dr.Chetan Maringanti and Dr. Mamuka
Gvilava were duly acknowledged for preparing this post. Especially on the
script writing part and compiling the information’s for possible data sources.
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