Collecting and Assessing Observed Climate Data

Observational data was required to evaluate CCAM climate model outputs. At the time of the study, observational data for the selected station was not available. However, gridded observational temperature and rainfall datasets were available from APHRODITE (gridded rainfall station data) and TRMM (gridded satellite-based rainfall data), while the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) dataset (gridded observations) included both temperature and rainfall.

These gridded datasets were available for at least 30 years. All data was daily, and at varying resolutions: APHRODITE and TRMM data was available at 25 km resolution, and CRU was at 50 km.

These are global datasets so data was extracted for the nearest grid box to the station locations. While this data is not as good as station data, it was quality controlled and evaluated in other studies against observations, deemed adequate for the purpose of this study.

Gridded data represents an area and not a specific location. However, for this case study, the locations chosen were picked to be representative of the range of rice growing regions in Thailand, so using gridded data is adequate