The ICARDA Agro-Climate tool

Abstract

A Visual Basic agro-climate application developed by climatologists at the International Center tier Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) and the U.S Department of Agriculture is described here The applications climate database consists of Weather generator parameters derived from the daily data of 649 meteorological stations in file ICARDA mandate region From those parameters the program calculates climate statistics over arbitrarily defined periods within summer Or winter growing seasons at user-selected latitude-longitude coordinates The statistics reported include crop evapotranspiration estimates derived from the FAO-56 single crop coefficient algorithm, probabilities of exceedence of both cumulative rainfall and growing degree days. the probability that minimum and maximum dally temperatures will exceed user-defined temperature thresholds and the probability of heat stress, cold stress and dry periods of varying duration Copyright (C) 2009 Royal Meteorological Society