Land & Water

Local Climate Estimator (New_LocClim)

New_LocClim is a software program and database that provides estimates of average climatic conditions at locations for which no observations are available. Besides providing climatic characteristics at individual points, the software offers the possibility of producing climate maps from user provided station data, or where such stations are not available, to produce maps of the average climatic conditions (8 variables) taken from the updated FAOCLIM database of almost 30,000 stations worldwide. The software also allows visualization of the vegetation period through the growing season calendar (at what times of the year, dry, moist and humid periods occur).

New_LocClim is basically an improved version of LocClim, which it supersedes. In addition to an automatic selection mode, New_LocClim allows the user to select from 9 different spatial interpolation methods and to investigate the interpolation errors and the influence of different settings on the results. This allows to optimize the interpolation with respect to the data analyzed.

New_LocClim allows users to add constraints on the maximum number of stations and maximum station distance to be used for interpolation, and, depending on the interpolation method, to set its parameters and specify whether negative interpolated values are permitted or not. New_LocClim also allows users to add constraints on local vertical gradients. Of temperature, precipitation and other variables.

Source (link)
Scale
National, Sub-national/Province/District, Watershed/Basin/Landscape
Type
Data
Applicability
National, Sub-national/ Province/ District, Watershed/Basin/Landscape
Category
Support tools
Sub-Category
Assessment and mapping tools: Climate
Thematic areas
Climate
User Category
Technical specialist, Scientific advisor, Stakeholder