About this Service

This application, also called the Great Lakes Weather Data Service for SWAT (Can-GLWS), is a Data as a Service (DaaS) platform that allows application users to download SWAT-ready climate data (historical, climate change scenarios and weather statistics) of a pre-specified region within the Canadian Great Lakes watersheds. The aim of this application is to remove the redundancy associated with SWAT-model weather data preparation. Service / app users simply need to provide / delineate their area of interest (within the Canadian Great Lakes watersheds), and they can subsequently download their desired SWAT-model-ready weather inputs (historical, climate change-related or weather statistics).

Data Sources

Historical Data: SWAT-ready historical weather data is derived from the weather dataset provided by Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) in the ESRI ASCII file format. The original gridded dataset is available at 300 arc seconds spatial resolution. Further details on the original dataset are available in (McKenney et al., 2011) .

Climate Change Data: SWAT-ready climate change data is derived from the PCIC dataset which is archived at Pacific Climate Impact Consortium (PCIC)'s website . The modified PCIC dataset available here includes statistically downscaled precipitation, and maximum and minimum temperature data, in SWAT-ready format, at 300 arc seconds (~10km) spatial resolution for a simulated period until 2100, including a historical period (1950-2005) which was used to calibrate two downscaling methods. The dataset available in this service includes 12 Global Climate Models (GCM), 3 Scenarios and 2 downscaling methods.

Weather Statistics Database: The SWAT weather generator statistics dataset (pertaining to precipitation and temperature) are calculated using historical data of 66-year period (1950-2015) (McKenney et al., 2011) . The weather statistics pertaining to solar radiation, wind speed and relative humidity are taken from CFSR database (CFSR, 2016) .

Code

This application is developed using R Shiny. The application code is available on Github

Authors

Dr Narayan K. Shrestha, Watershed Research Group, School of Engineering, University of Guelph, ON, Canada
Dr Taimoor Akhtar, Watershed Research Group, School of Engineering, University of Guelph, ON, Canada
Mr. Uttam Ghimire, Watershed Research Group, School of Engineering, University of Guelph, ON, Canada and Stockholm Environment Institute Asia Center, Bangkok, Thailand
Dr Ramesh P. Rudra, Watershed Research Group, School of Engineering, University of Guelph, ON, Canada
Dr Pradeep K. Goel, Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks, Etobicoke, ON, Canada
Dr Rituraj Shukla, Watershed Research Group, School of Engineering, University of Guelph, ON, Canada
Dr Prasad Daggupati, Watershed Research Group, School of Engineering, University of Guelph, ON, Canada

Contact

akhtart@uoguelph.ca

Historical Weather Data Download

In order to download historical weather data, first choose a geographical area by either i) Using the polygon drawing tool (left side of map) to draw a custom area or ii) uploading a zipped boundary (single polygon) shape file, using the 'DATA SELECTOR' panel. Once a valid area is selected that has atleast one weather data point, the download button will be enabled. Data may be filtered further by selecting climate parameter and date ranges in the 'DATA SELECTOR' before final download. Please note that there may be a wait time of a few seconds or minutes after the download button is clicked and before download begins (since the data is being prepared).

Climate Change Data Download

In order to download climate change data, follow the same workflow as for historical data and first choose a geographical area by either i) Using the polygon drawing tool to draw a custom area or ii) uploading a zipped boundary (single polygon) shape file, using the 'DATA SELECTOR' panel. Once a valid area is selected that has atleast one weather data point, the download button will be enabled. Data may be filtered further by changing the Climate Model, Scenario etc., and/or by selecting climate parameter and date ranges in the 'DATA SELECTOR' before final download. Please note that there may be a wait time of a few seconds or minutes after the download button is clicked and before download begins (since the data is being prepared).

Weather Statistics Data Download

In order to download weather statistics data (in SWAT format) choose a geographical area by either i) Using the polygon drawing tool to draw a custom area or ii) uploading a zipped boundary (single polygon) shape file, using the 'DATA SELECTOR' panel. Once a valid area is selected that has atleast one weather data point, the download button will be enabled.Please note that there may be a wat time of a few seconds or minutes after the download button is clicked and before download begins (since the data is being prepared).

Shape File Format

If preferred area selection mechanism is a user-provided Shape File then please make sure that all files associated with the uploaded shape input (e.g., *.shp, *.dbf etc) are in a zipped folder. Also the shape should be a boundary / single polygon.

Contact Information

Please contact us at: pdaggupa@uoguelph.ca for further queries and information.