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.

Model contents