Effect of Estimated Daily Global Solar Radiation Data on the Results of Crop Growth Models.docVIP

Sensors 2007, 7, 2330-2362 sensors ISSN 1424-8220 ? 2007 by MDPI /sensors Full Research Paper Effect of Estimated Daily Global Solar Radiation Data on the Results of Crop Growth Models Miroslav Trnka 1,*, Josef Eitzinger 2, Pavel Kapler 1, Martin Dubrovsky 1,3 , Daniela Semerádová 1, Zdeněk ?alud 1 and Herbert Formayer 2 1 Institute of Agrosystems and Bioclimatology (217), Mendel University of Agriculture and Forestry, Zemedelska 1, 613 00 Brno, Czech Republic 2 Institute for Meteorology, University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Peter Jordan St. 82, A-1190 Vienna, Austria 3 Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Czech Academy of Science, Bo?ní II/1401, 141 31 Prague, Czech Republic * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed. Working group homepage: http://www.ufa.cas.cz/dub/crop/crop.htm#models Received: 14 September 2007 / Accepted: 15 October 2007 / Published: 16 October 2007 Abstract: The results of previous studies have suggested that estimated daily global radiation (RG) values contain an error that could compromise the precision of subsequent crop model applications. The following study presents a detailed site and spatial analysis of the RG error propagation in CERES and WOFOST crop growth models in Central European climate conditions. The research was conducted i) at the eight individual sites in Austria and the Czech Republic where measured daily RG values were available as a reference, with seven methods for RG estimation being tested, and ii) for the agricultural areas of the Czech Republic using daily data from 52 weather stations, with five RG estimation methods. In the latter case the RG values estimated from the hours of sunshine using the ?ngstr?m-Prescott formula were used as the standard method because of the lack of measured RG data. At the site level we found that even the use of methods based on hours of sunshine, which showed the lowest bias in RG estimates, led to