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 errors, and are often in an inconvenient format. The WeatherMan is a user-oriented software package designed to assist in preparing daily weather data for use with simulation models. The software can import or export daily weather files with any column format (including the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer ver. 2.1 and ver. 3.0 files) and convert the data to desirable units. Data are checked and flagged for possible errors on import. Several techniques are available for filling in missing values and erroneous data on export. WeatherMan also contains two methods (WGEN and SIMMETEO) for stochastically generating 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 can be graphed or presented in tables.