Abstract
Meteorological data are essential in precision agriculture in the Canadian Prairies and are often associated with spatiotemporal discontinuity and scarcity. Reanalysis data products aim to address this challenge and have recently gained popularity. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ ERA5, and its high-resolution land component, ERA5-Land, are two reanalysis datasets that provide hourly estimates of many climate variables globally. This paper focuses on evaluating the performance of ERA5 and ERA5-Land over the Canadian prairies, utilizing data from 109 weather stations situated in southern Manitoba, Canada. Various variables are investigated at daily, monthly, and annual aggregation periods, including air temperature, ground temperature, soil water content, wind speed, precipitation, and evaporation. The datasets are evaluated regarding seasonal bias and spatial distribution of errors over the study area. Regression parameters are also presented to address the biases. Among the investigated variables, air temperature and wind speed exhibit the lowest errors. The evaluation further reveals an overall tendency to overpredict ground temperatures and precipitation while underpredicting evaporation. Based on these findings, the ERA5 and ERA5-Land datasets hold significant potential in applications such as climate-smart agriculture, energy demand analysis, assessing renewable energy resources, and facilitating sustainable urban development.
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Data availability
Weather station data are available upon request by contacting Mr. E. RoTimi Ojo at Manitoba Agriculture (timi.ojo@gov.mb.ca). ERA5 and ERA5-Land data are publicly available at Copernicus Climate Change Service (https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/). The output data are included as supplementary materials.
Code availibility
The code will be published in a public repository following the acceptance of the manuscript.
Abbreviations
- Ev :
-
Total evaporation [mm]
- Pr :
-
Total precipitation [mm]
- Ta :
-
Air temperature [\(^{\circ }\)C]
- Ts1:
-
Ground temperature at level 1 (0–7 cm) [\(^{\circ }\)C]
- Ts2:
-
Ground temperature at level 2 (7–28 cm) [\(^{\circ }\)C]
- Ts3:
-
Ground temperature at level 3 (28–100 cm) [\(^{\circ }\)C]
- Ts4:
-
Ground temperature at level 4 (100–289 cm) [\(^{\circ }\)C]
- SWV1:
-
Soil water volume at level 1 (0–7 cm) [\(^{\circ }\)C]
- SWV2:
-
Soil water volume at level 2 (7–28 cm) [\(^{\circ }\)C]
- SWV3:
-
Soil water volume at level 3 (28–100 cm) [\(^{\circ }\)C]
- SWV4:
-
Soil water volume at level 4 (100–289 cm) [\(^{\circ }\)C]
- WS :
-
Wind speed [m/s]
- MBE:
-
Mean bias error
- MAE:
-
Mean absolute error
- RMSE:
-
Root mean square error
- NMBE:
-
Normalized mean bias error
- NMAE:
-
Normalized mean absolute error
- NRMSE:
-
Normalized root mean square error
- ERA5L:
-
ERA5-Land
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Funding
This research was supported by the New Frontiers in Research Fund - Exploration Grant [NFRF-2018-00966] and the Mitacs E-Accelerate program [IT20113]. The authors would like to acknowledge the Province of Manitoba for providing the field data used in this research.
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AFG: conceptualization, model development, data curation, formal analysis, investigation, writing—original draft, visualization. PM: conceptualization, model development, investigation, writing—review and editing, supervision, project administration, funding acquisition. ERO: data curation, writing—original draft, review and editing. AS: conceptualization, review and editing, project administration, supervision.
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Fatolahzadeh Gheysari, A., Maghoul, P., Ojo, E.R. et al. Reliability of ERA5 and ERA5-Land reanalysis data in the Canadian Prairies. Theor Appl Climatol 155, 3087–3098 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-023-04771-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-023-04771-z