I am trying to distribute temperature and precipitation data in mountainous catchment. I have a data of one of the station within the catchment and want to distribute on each grid of the DEM using lapse rate and vertical gradient. I am planning to use R software to do so. How can i do this?
Dear Amrit,
You may want to think carefully about what you want to achieve, and how you might implement your approach, before jumping on a ready-made software package.
First of all, the atmospheric temperature field is generally continuous and smooth, with rather larger variations in the vertical direction than in the 'horizontal plane'. This implies that some form of spatial extrapolation may generate reasonable estimates, provided you have access to
- a reasonably fine resolution DEM,
- multiple measurements at different geographic locations and altitudes across your catchment, as well as for different times (throughout the day and for various seasons), and
- reliable information on the local lapse rate in the atmosphere at the time those measurements are available
By contrast, precipitations are highly localized, especially in mountainous environments: there may be some correlation with altitude (or slope) at your place of interest, but whatever may have been found elsewhere will probably not apply to your case. Extrapolation across a landscape may not be reliable, unless you are only interested in long term averages.
If you only have data for one station in your catchment, any extrapolation will be just an exercise in guesswork, whether you use a computer code or a dice...
To proceed along this discussion, please provide more information on the spatial and temporal scales of your region/time period of interest, as well as on your accuracy requirements. Cheers, Michel.
I do have that code and if it is for Langtang area than you can read Konz et al 2007 paper and Immerzeel et al 2012 too.
Dear Michel, thank you for your suggestions and advice.
I am trying to do this in Langtang river basin, Nepal. I am planning to use the spatial resolution of 450m*450m. temperature and precip are the major input forcing for the model so i guess i should have more reliable data. I had got the lapse rates and precipitation gradients from literature. They have calculated seasonal lapse rates and and precip gradients both in vertical and horizontal direction. Some have also run the model using the same value and got good result. So i am also planning to use the same value.
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