18 February 2011

World Water and Climate Atlas

The World Water and Climate Atlas creates online climate summaries for user-specified locations. All you have to do is enter the latitude and longitude coordinates for the location(s) which you are interested in and specify which climate variables are needed. This tool then searches over several terabytes of data in the World Water and Climate Atlas and deliver climate summaries almost instantly. The data is displayed in an easy-to-read table, by month, allowing users to access FREE Global Climate data !

Screen-grab of the Lat-Long data entry sheet, where you can query up to 5 locations.

The World Water and Climate Atlas gives users a rapid access to accurate data on climate and moisture availability for agriculture.

The Atlas includes monthly and annual summaries for precipitation, temperature, humidity, hours of sunshine, evaporation estimates, wind speed, total number of days with and without rainfall, days without frost and Penman-Montieth reference evapotranspiration rates.

The core of the Atlas is data assembled from weather stations around the world for the period 1961-1990. Data can be extracted in summary, manipulated using the Atlas software, or exported in a standardized format for use in other applications. Users can also include their own local data for a more detailed picture of a particular area.

Screen-grab of the query result sheet of Climate data

Applications include:
  • identifying areas suitable for rainfed agriculture
  • determining how much irrigation is needed in relation to what the climate provides
  • providing inputs for hydrological modeling of river basins
  • extracting climate inputs for crop modeling

Click here to access the World Water and Climate Atlas site

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