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ARS Home » Pacific West Area » Boise, Idaho » Northwest Watershed Research Center » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #132627
Title: The GEM (Generation of Weather Elements for Multiple Applications) weather simulation model

Author
item Hanson, Clayton
item JOHNSON, GREGORY - USDA-NRCS
item Frymire, William

Submitted to: Thirteenth Conference on Applied Climatology AMS Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 4/2/2002
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Agricultural and natural resource management decisions require a variety of climatic information that can be used for specific applications such as land use planning, and ecological and hydrologic modeling. Often climate data requirements are greater than the available information because climate records are either unavailable, very short or there are significant numbers of missing records. Therefore, it is desirable to have the capacity to generate weather data that have the appropriate statistical characteristics for a location. This paper will describe the latest version of the stochastic weather simulation model GEM (Generation of weather Elements for Multiple applications) that was developed by the USDA-ARS and USDA-NRCS to deliver accurate time series of daily weather data. GEM can be used to generate daily precipitation amount, maximum and minimum air temperature, average dew-point temperature, solar radiation, and average wind speed. At the present time, GEM provides easy access to simulated weather data for more than 220 locations in the United States, including 16 in Alaska and three in Hawaii. Results form this study show that data generated by GEM closely mimics nearly all aspects of the climate at Omaha, NE. It was also determined that climatic data from stations around Omaha, NE could be used to obtain some of the parameters that are required to run GEM.