French agroclimatic research network dataset

Abstract

The AgroClim dataset includes multi-decade long time-series of daily and hourly data from weather stations composed by the same twelve instruments at 54 sites throughout the French territory, including Corsica, Guyana and Guadeloupe. A large diversity of INRAE research projects benefited from the reliable climatological data from this dataset for decades. Now that the dataset is provided in open access for all, this paper describes the acquisition methods and maintenance that ensure the quality of the data. This data can contribute to enlarge observatories and observation datasets or assimilated, for producing reanalysis dataset, and ultimately used for validation of earth system simulations. Furthermore, this dataset contains rarely available measures as leaf wetness duration and soil temperature at 10 and 50 cm depths, which are useful for crop models and carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycle modelling. Moreover, the sites are located on research experimental sites, which contain data from long term agronomy experiments and can contribute to the study of a variety of bio-climatological studies.

Keywords: Climate; Humidity; Precipitation; Radiation; Temperature; Weather; Wetness; Wind.

Fig. 1

Data files structure.

Fig. 2

Example of the data content, illustrated by a fragment of time-series for the weather station located in Avignon (84007004) in daily (a) and hourly (b) time-step.

Fig. 3

Annual mean temperature and precipitation for each one of the 54 INRAE agroclimatic stations of this dataset, extracted from station summary charts [11]. The four stations located in the tropics (Guyana and Guadeloupe) are represented by the darker dots (lower latitudes), with the highest mean annual temperatures and the higher total annual precipitation in the network.

Fig. 4

Map of stations of the INRAE national agroclimatic network currently running.

Fig. 5

Standard INRAE national agroclimatic network station. (1) rain gauge; (2) global radiation and PAR measurement; (3) wind direction measurement; (4) air temperature (2m) and humidity measurement; (5) wind speed measurement; (6) leaf wetness duration sensor; (7) temperatures at +10 and +50cm above the soil surface) and soil temperature measurement (-10 and -50cm). The system is autonomous thanks to the solar panel and the battery placed at the central acquisition box under the temperature shelter (4) and the data is transmitted by General Packet Radio Service (GPRS).