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