Crop development models are commonly used in research.
However, their use as crop management tools for growers is
rare. Decision support systems (DSS), which combine crop
models with expert systems, are being developed to provide
management assistance to growers. Researchers at Oregon
State University are in the process of developing a DSS.
Research was conducted to develop a computer program to
provide current and generated weather data for use by the
DSS. The objectives of this research were to obtain a
weather station, develop a set of quality control procedures
to check data from the station, obtain a weather generator
program, and create a weather data manager program to
implement the above objectives.
A weather station was obtained and was placed near two
existing weather stations for ten months. Data from the
weather station was compared with the other two stations for
values of monthly average maximum temperature, minimum
temperature, and daily total solar radiation and monthly
total precipitation. The weather station performed well.
Only measurements of total daily solar radiation were
consistently different from the other stations. Based on a
comparison of the weather station with an Eppley
pyranometer, a factor was calculated to correct the solar
radiation readings.
The quality control procedures used on the weather data
were adapted from automated procedures given in the
literature. When tested, the procedures performed as
desired. When used on actual data from the weather station,
values that failed the procedures were apparently legitimate
values. Options were added to the data manager program that
allow the user to quickly decide what to do with failed
values.
For a weather data generator, WGEN was chosen from the
generators presented in the literature. An input parameter
file was created for the Corvallis, Oregon area and thirty
years of data were generated. Monthly means from this data
were compared with thirty-year historical monthly means for
Corvallis. Precipitation data from WGEN compared well with
the historical data. The generated data for maximum and
minimum temperature and daily total solar radiation had
great differences from the historical data. It is believed
that the input parameters for the Corvallis area suggested
by the authors of WGEN are not appropriate.
The weather data manager program was written in the C
programming language, and occupies approximately 98
kilobytes of disk space, not including the eleven files
created directly and indirectly by the program. The main
functions of the program are: 1) retrieving data from the
weather station and performing quality control procedures on
the data (allowing the user to decide what to do with values
that failed QC); 2) viewing and editing of files by the
user; 3) weather data generation (creating a file of only
generated data or appending generated data to the file of
current data from the weather station to create a file
containing a full year of weather data); and 4)
miscellaneous functions (monitoring the weather station,
setting the calendar in the station's datalogger, and
changing information used by the data manager program).
It is hoped that this program will be a significant
contribution towards the development of a decision support
system. / Graduation date: 1992
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ORGSU/oai:ir.library.oregonstate.edu:1957/36712 |
| Date | 14 November 1991 |
| Creators | Donaldson, William S. |
| Contributors | Moss, Dale N. |
| Source Sets | Oregon State University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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