The use of Climatic Data Generator to cope with Daily Climatic Data Scarcity in Simulation Studies

Abstract

The use of simulation modelling approaches to evaluate how systems respond to historical climates and how systems will respond to change in management practices has been widely applied. This approach normally requires long records of historical daily climatic data. However, in most developing countries, historical records of daily climate data are not well maintained, but the historical monthly data is frequently available. This study evaluated the use of generated daily climatic data from the monthly means in simulation studies to overcome the problem of data scarcity. Two simulation models, APSIM and VIC-BASIN, were run using the generated and observed daily climatic data. It was found that the outputs from the models resulted from the generated and observed daily climatic data were not significantly different. This result promotes the use historical monthly climatic data to assess historical response of biological systems to variable climate.