Climate benchmarks and input parameters representing locations in 68 countries for a stochastic weather generator, CLIGEN

Abstract

This dataset contains input parameters for 12 703 locations around the world to parameterize a stochastic weather generator called CLIGEN. The parameters are essentially monthly statistics relating to daily precipitation, temperature, and solar radiation. The dataset is separated into three sub-datasets differentiated by having monthly statistics determined from 30-, 20-, and 10-year record lengths. Input parameters related to precipitation were calculated primarily from the NOAA GHCN-Daily network. The remaining input parameters were calculated from various sources including global meteorological and land-surface models that are informed by remote sensing and other methods. The new CLIGEN dataset includes inputs for locations in the US, which were compared to a selection of stations from an existing US CLIGEN dataset representing 2648 locations. This validation showed reasonable agreement between the two datasets, with the majority of parameters showing less than 20 % discrepancy relative to the existing dataset. For the three new datasets, differentiated by the minimum record lengths used for calculations, the validation showed only a small increase in discrepancy going towards shorter record lengths, such that the average discrepancy for all parameters was greater by 5 % for the 10-year dataset. The new CLIGEN dataset has the potential to improve the spatial coverage of analysis for a variety of CLIGEN applications and reduce the effort needed in preparing climate inputs. The dataset is available at the National Agriculture Library Data Commons website at https://data.nal.usda.gov/dataset/international-climate-benchmarks-and-input-parameters-stochastic-weather-generator-cligen (last access: 20 November 2020) and https://doi.org/10.15482/USDA.ADC/1518706 (Fullhart et al., 2020a).