LocClim is a software developed by the Agrometeorology Group of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The software provides an estimate of climatic conditions at different location regardless of the availability of observations. This software is of great importance if you want to know the climatic conditions of certain location and you do not have available observation points. It is possible to modify the stations that provide the data, so you can control the accuracy of the estimates. This tutorial demonstrates how to download the New LocClim software, how to find a location and how to export the resulting data.

Methodology

For this tutorial, we will be working on WorkBench Mode. The first step is to download and open New LocClim, as shown in the video, and click on WorkBench Mode.

Then, we will select the location of the area of interest. There are several options but in this case we will use the Point Estimates/ Input coordinates one. With this option we can input the coordinates and also the elevation value of the point. We can change the elevation value if we want to compare the relationship between climate and elevation according to the mathematical estimations applied by LocClim.

The obtained parameters such as precipitation, potential evapotranspiration and temperature will be discussed. These parameters offer an overview of the climatic conditions of the studied point.

Next, the altitude plot will be analyzed to decide which stations could be outliers and remove them from the analysis. The Observation-altitude-plot will be opened and the stations will be displayed with their station number.

We will open the Regional Map to see the location of the stations and we will display them by their number. Then, we can click on the potential outliers and deactivate them.

After deactivating potential outliers, we will check the table of precipitation and evapotranspiration export it as a .CSV file by using the Export/Table/Save option.

Finally, we will open the results on a spreadsheet on Excel by going to Data/Obtain external data From Text, selecting Delimited, Next, selecting Tab and Comma as the separators, click on Finish and selecting the target sheet. We will obtain a table with the values of Precipitation and Evapotranspiration of the study area for the different months of the year.