WEATHERMAN - A UTILITY FOR MANAGING AND GENERATING DAILY WEATHER DATA

Daily weather data commonly used in simulation models of agricultural or ecological systems are sometimes incomplete, frequently contain err ors, and are often in an inconvenient format. The WeatherMan is a user -oriented software package designed to assist in preparing daily weath er data for use with simulation models. The software can import or exp ort daily weather files with any column format (including the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer ver. 2.1 and ver. 3.0 file s) and convert the data to desirable units. Data are checked and flagg ed for possible errors on import. Several techniques are available for filling in missing values and erroneous data on export. WeatherMan al so contains two methods (WGEN and SIMMETEO) for stochastically generat ing sequences of daily weather data. Both methods can be parameterized from the daily data and the second method uses monthly means from any secondary data source. Summary statistics of raw and generated data c an be graphed or presented in tables.