Philip Thornton, a scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), who leads a research theme of the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) on Data and Tools for Analysis and Planning, provides the following news.

‘To make the necessary decisions and investments for climate adaptation in agriculture, we need information about future weather conditions. The CGIAR Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security has been improving the MarkSimGCM stochastic weather generator tool, released last year. MarkSim GCM lets the user generate plausible weather data for future climates . . . .  The tool is embedded in Google Earth and can also be used to generate daily data that are characteristic of current conditions, based on the WorldClim dataset, an interpolated surface of weather station data from around the world mostly covering the years 1960-1990.’The new tool, called Marksim_Standalone, is a development of the new MarkSimGCM web application. It is designed for computer users who need to process a lot of data without the need for a user interface. . . .

‘MarkSimGCM and MarkSim_StandAlone were developed by Waen Associates with CCAFS support, in cooperation with CIAT, ILRI, IFPRI, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, HarvestChoice, and the University of Oxford.’

Read the whole article, written by Philip Thornton, and see its links to the tools, on the CCAFS blog: New tool generates future weather data for crop and climate planning, 5 Apr 2012.