Abstract
A core requirement for many ecosystem modeling approaches is surface weather fields, including temperature, precipitation, humidity, and incident solar radiation. Carbon dynamics and flux estimates from process models depend strongly on daily and subdaily weather conditions. One common obstacle to model implementation over continental scale regions is the difficulty of obtaining the relevant surface weather observations from in situ networks, and producing spatially interpolated (gridded) surfaces of the necessary weather fields at the appropriate spatial and temporal resolution. One approach that has been developed to overcome this obstacle is Daymet, a numerical method for producing gridded surfaces of subdaily temperature (daily maximum and minimum temperature), and daily precipitation, humidity, and radiation over large regions of complex terrain, using daily surface weather observations and an accurate elevation grid as input.
We are providing a high-quality gridded surface weather product over North America for input to NACP process modeling studies by expanding on the conterminous U.S. Daymet domain to include Canada (south of 52N) and Mexico. Download Daymet Data: http://daac.ornl.gov/cgi-bin/dsviewer.pl?ds_id=1219. Input data requirements for the conterminous US, Mexico, and Canada for 1980 - 2008 have been used to produce the Daymet product for these areas; the data will be released in Fall 2010. MAST-DC is developing several ways to select and distribute the Daymet data: ftp download, single-pixel extraction, and access through THREDDS (Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services) Data Server (TDS). Periodic updates to the continental data set will be implemented as new years of surface observations become available.
