Data

This user guide describes the basic structures and functions to run the base models provided in the package, and define your biome schemes and run them.

Requirements in input data

Climatological and soil input

1) Climatological data

The climatological variables—temperature, tmin, cloud cover, and precipitation—are downloaded from the CHELSA database. Each variable is available per month for a specified year. In addition to yearly data, CHELSA also provides multi-year climatologies (averaged datasets over longer time periods).

2) Soil characteristics data

Soil characteristics are generated using the makesoil module from ARVE Research. This script produces a NetCDF file with the two variables required by BIOME4:

• whc — soil water-holding capacity
• Ksat — soil saturated conductivity

Climate envelope models

The climate envelope models here are a Julia re-implementation of the CHELSA module for mapping climatologies at high resolutions (see: CHELSA 1-km Köppen-Geiger and the original SAGA tool: climatetools19).

Inputs:

• Thornthwaite, TrollPfaffen, Wissmann
  • Temperature climatologies
  • Precipitation climatologies
• Köppen–Geiger
  • Temperature climatologies
  • Precipitation climatologies
  • Latitude and longitude information (for seasonal partitioning/hemisphere logic)

Mechanistic models

The BIOME4 model and other PFT-based frameworks require the following gridded inputs:

• Climatological monthly mean temperature (°C)
• Climatological monthly mean cloud cover (%)
• Climatological monthly total precipitation (mm)
• Soil water-holding capacity in two or more layers (mm/mm)
• Soil saturated conductivity in two or more layers (mm/h)

BIOME4 also requires a single global value for atmospheric CO₂ concentration.