Evaluation of Weather Generator ClimGen for Southern Ontario

Abstract

Modelling of soil water systems has become an important tool for water quality management and source water protection. Application of such models requires long-term continuous weather data from several weather stations distributed across the watershed. However, historic weather data often have missing records, large gaps in data or the length of the record may not be sufficient to include flood or drought conditions of interest. This has led to the development and use of weather generation procedures and tools. In this paper, the weather generator ClimGen has been evaluated for generation of daily precipitation, air temperature, solar radiation, wind speed, and relative humidity for southern Ontario conditions. The comparison of simulated weather data with 30 years of weather data for six stations indicated that ClimGen performed with reasonable accuracy with some limitations in generating rainfall intensities and solar radiation, particularly for the winter months.