The primary driving variables for estimating ecosystem processes with Biome-BGC are daily meteorological data. One of the main premises of the Biome-BGC logic is that if we can adequately describe the dependence of key processes on environmental factors related to daily meteorology, then we can estimate these processes anywhere that daily meteorological data are available.
The following near-surface meteorological parameters are required by Biome-BGC:
In many cases, the only data available for a particular site are the daily maximum and minimum temperatures, and the daily total precipitation. We have developed simple and accurate algorithms to estimate the radiation and humidity parameters when they are missing (see our MT-CLIM page).
In other cases, we are interested
in performing simulations at a site that has no meteorological measurements
at all. In this case, if there is a nearby weather station, perhaps at a different
elevation, then MT-CLIM is used to
estimate the site meteorology. Often there is not a station very nearby, or
there are two or more neighboring stations that might be used to estimate the
daily meteorological parameters for the site. In that case it may be necessary
to interpolate between individual stations, and possibley extrapolate to a different
elevation. This is often the case when we perform gridded
Biome-BGC simulations over large regions. We have developed a sophisticated
set of algorithms to treat this problem (see our Daymet
page).