Wednesday, November 15, 2006
292-8
PACT - Rainfall Analysis and Conversion Tool.
Andreas Klik and Christian Rauter. BOKU Univ, Muthgasse 18, Vienna, Austria
One of the most time consuming steps in the application phase of an soil erosion model is the setup of the climate input file. Depending on the temporal resolution of measured climatic data, the volume of recorded data can increase considerably. Therefore significant resources must be made available for the conversion of the measurements into a model readable layout. Despite the fact of necessary resources, in some cases scientists are faced with the problem of missing data e.g. erroneous measurements. PACT (Precipitation Analysis and Conversion Tool) is a user-friendly windows application to analyze precipitation data and derive automatically climate input files for erosion models like WEPP and RUSLE. It enables the calculation of amount and kinetic energy/erosive force of rainfall events and combination of this information with other climatic data like solar radiation, wind speed and direction, dew point aso. The program offers a way to minimize the required resources and to overcome the problem of unavailable/missing data. It includes a four step procedure: 1) importation and analysis of measured data with high temporal resolution, 2) addition of missing values for recommended parameters from any suitable rainfall gauge to the measured data, 3) addition of missing days and corresponding values, 4) finalization in a model readable format.