摘要：Long-term, reliable, continuous and real-time weather and climatic data are essential forefficient management and sustainable use of natural resources. This paper describes the weatherstation network (WSN) of the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) of South Africa, includinginformation on instrumentation, data retrieval and processing protocols, calibration and maintenanceprotocols, as well as applications of the collected data. To this end, the WSN of the ARC consistsof over 600 automatic weather stations that are distributed across the country to cover a widerange of agro-climatic zones. At each weather station, air temperature, rainfall, relative humidity,solar irradiance, wind speed and direction are monitored and archived on an hourly basis. Themain objective of this WSN is to archive climate information for South Africa as well as supply theagricultural community with weather data to support decision-making.
关键词：climate data;data retrieval;quality control;weather data;weather station network
