Washington DC
FROM July, farmers around the world will be able to call on the World Wide
Web to help them decide which crops are most likely to prosper in their
fields.
The World Water and Climate Atlas contains temperature and precipitation data
for the entire Earth鈥檚 surface, based on 30 years of observations from some 56
000 weather stations. When the atlas goes online in July, farmers will be able
to see what the weather is usually like on any 1.6-kilometre square on the
globe.
Advertisement
The atlas is intended to help farmers decide what crops to plant, and to help
governments decide where to build new irrigation projects. 鈥淭his tool will be of
tremendous use to decision makers, allowing them to see what works and what
doesn鈥檛 work,鈥� says Ismail Serageldin, chairman of the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
The program鈥檚 graphical presentation of weather data shows patterns that
might not otherwise be evident, says Serageldin. In one site along the River
Indus, for instance, the map shows that the Indian side typically gets heavier
rainfall than the Pakistani side. Though small, the difference is enough to
affect the best time for farmers to plant crops and the optimum time to irrigate
them, says Serageldin.
One of the biggest tasks in developing the atlas was checking the accuracy of
the data, says Donald Jensen, director of the Utah Climate Center, which
developed the atlas along with CGIAR. Many weather stations, for example, are in
cities or at airports, which tend to be hotter than the surrounding countryside.
So figures from these weather stations either had to be adjusted or
discarded.
Some early images from the atlas can be found on the Utah Climate Center鈥檚
Web site (http://climate.usu.edu/ science/).
