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Garden with Insight v1.0 Help: Weather next day functions: interpolate long-term daily means from monthly means
The weather simulation uses long-term averages (means) to generate weather data similar to that found in the selected
climate. When a weather forecaster says "The weather is unseasonably mild today -- the average
temperature for today is 40 degrees F, and our temperature is 50 degrees F", "average
temperature" is the same as the long-term mean temperature for the climate. The data files
used here have long-term means based on 20-30 years of weather data collected at weather stations around
the US.
The EPIC model uses monthly weather means to generate daily weather. We added an interpolation step to smooth the monthly means so the weather would look
more realistic in a shorter time scale. For example, the mean
temperature in one location might look like this:
The smoothed daily values balance out some of the large differences between succeeding days in different
months, so there is no jump in the mean value between April 30th and May 1st. The variables smoothed
in this way are: temperature (minimum and maximum), solar radiation, relative humidity, the probability of it raining today, wind
speed, wind direction, and rainfall.
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