The use of Geographic Information Systems in climatology and meteorology: COST 719

Abstract

The COST Action 719 started in 2001 and presently 20 European countries are participating. The main objectives of the Action are to establish interfaces between GIS and meteorological data, assess the availability, contents and accessibility of meteorological and climatological data sets and encourage and foster European co-operation. The tasks are carried out within three working groups concentrated on issues such as data access and availability, methods of spatial interpolation and developing recommendations for standardised GIS applications.The applications that have been adopted mainly focus on three parameters, i.e. precipitation, temperature and energy balance for which three demonstration projects have been formulated. It is expected that the Action will result in recommendations for better and more cost-effective production of state-of-the-art meteorological and climatological information. Also an improvement of the co-operation between European countries in the application of GIS in the field of meteorology, climatology and environmental sciences should be achieved together with better-trained personnel within the operational and scientific divisions of national meteorological services.Additionally, the development of a visualisation system for climate data sets for internet applications is under preparation. This paper provides information concerning the work in progress on the demonstration projects made within COST 719.

Comparison of different procedures to map reference evapotranspiration using geographical information systems and regression‐based techniques

“…Such techniques are known as global techniques, and are based on deterministic models and the use of a digital terrain model (DTM) and geographic information systems (GIS) (Burrough and McDonnell, 1998;Dyras et al, 2005). A number of studies have demonstrated the vast potential of these techniques in mapping different climate variables, as the method provides significant improvements over results from local and geostatistical methods (e.g.…”

MeteoInfo: GIS software for meteorological data visualization and analysis

“…Although GIS strategies have become increasingly popular in meteorological applications (Dyras et al , ; Shipley, ), commercial GIS software packages are normally very expensive and complex in operation for most users in meteorological fields. Furthermore, they are not able to conveniently deal with some popular meteorological data formats such as GRIB and NetCDF.…”

Calculation of climatic reference values and its use for automatic outlier detection in meteorological datasets

“…The result, a map of residuals, shows the amount of variability that is not explained by the regression model. This variability can be attributed either to errors in the original datasets or to relationships with physiographic or meteorological magnitudes that have not been considered in the The physiographic parameters used in the regression are: altitude, latitude, longitude, distance to sea and average and minimum altitudes in circles of 5 to 40 km radius, which are considered, following Dyras et al (2005), in order to account for topography at different scales. Then, the best predictive parameters for a given variable are chosen using a technique called stepwise regression (Hocking, 1976).…”