Friday 26 February 2016

Research Plot Weather Station Data

As promised in my last post, below is the results of the 2015 weather station data collected at the research plot site.  This station collects not only the temperature but also: leaf wetness, solar radiation, wind speed (and gusts) and relative humidity.  I showed the 2014 data as well for comparison.  The temperature data was included in the previous blog and not shown here.

2015 Data
Location: 107 Burton Main Road
Min

Max

Average
Relative Humidity (%)
16.9
100
82
Solar Radiation (Watts/m2)
0.6
1119
284
Wind Speed (m/s)
0.0
4.03
1.2
Wind Gust (m/s)
0.0
14.9
4.5
Leaf Wetness (%)
0.0
100
54

As a comparison, 2014 data is below

2014 Data
Location: 107 Burton Main Road
Min

Max

Average
Relative Humidity (%)
20.3
100
83
Solar Radiation (Watts/m2)
23
1171
514
Wind Speed (m/s)
0.0
2.27
0.9
Wind Gusts (m/s)
0.0
12.09
4.0
Leaf Wetness (%)
0.0
100
35

So what do we take from this?  We had a pretty hot and dry year and our Leaf Wetness (dew point essentially) increased because of this.  Why? Our RH is about the same as 2014, so that means the dew point is pretty close the actual temperature (at 100% RH the dew point and temperature are the same and looking at individual data points we had many many days at 100% RH).  In a nutshell, even in hot dry weather our vines are getting wet - leading to all the wonderful mildew problems.
The real take-away is how important it is too keep our vines tied up, our canopy nicely pruned and the excess leaves pulled to allow the breeze to aid in keeping things dry.  As we learnt last year, even a diligent spray program fails if the vine management is not kept up.

Solar Radiation?  I would have expected it to increase.  I thought I was starting to understand just a little bit about what solar radiation is, but not really sure why our overall average would be less, when our season was really quite warm on a day to day basis. Any smart climate folks out there able to explain??  I blame the darn wasps!

Looking forward to a new growing season.  Pruning work bee coming up Sunday March 6 at 9AM.  Stay tuned!

Tuesday 2 February 2016

Climate Data 2015

We have been slowly visiting all the dataloggers and downloading for the 2015 season.  This year we seemed to run into a few problems with our HOBO units.  We had multiple failures in each region.  Some were attributed to animal damage, some just seemed to stop working and other were logging, but the data is corrupt.  I suspect we have neared the end of life for our units.  Out of the 38 we have, 12 experienced some type of problem. Hopefully a reboot of the units will correct the problem for next year.

I will post the data from our climate station located in the test plot in an upcoming post.


Looking at our frost free days, we do see an increase again this year. In many locations, there had not been a fall frost occurrence until well into November. For our purposes we used “slight” frost as our parameter, using 0°C for our last spring frost and -2°C for our first fall frost.  

Frost Free Days (FFD)
Region
2013
2014
2015
Nakusp
170
191
192
Arrow Park
165
175
192
Burton
175
177
187
Needles/Fauquier
162
171
182


We expected that our 2015 was a warmer year, and for the most part it was.  We had more FFD and most areas showed an increase in GDD. 

Growing Degree Days (GDD) is a measure of heat accumulation used to predict plant development rates such as the date that a crop will reach maturity. GDD is calculated by taking the average of the daily maximum and minimum temperatures minus a base temperature, (in our case 10 °C).  The yearly GDD is cumulative throughout the growing season (April 1 to October 31).

Growing Degree Days (GDD)

Region
2013
2014
2015
Nakusp
1074
1033
1011
Arrow Park
1059
997
1057
Burton
1139
1077
1116
Needles/Fauquier
1144
1060
1099