Comparison of Three Weather Generators Linking Apcc's Climate Outlook for South Korea.

The WGEN, SIMMETEO and LARS-WC stochastic weather generators are widely used in a range of studies, thus as agricultural crop simulations to determine to potential impact on crop growth, development and yield. To quality the potentials and limitations of weather generators, their performance should be evaluated when applied over a new region, or linked new climate forecasts with crop models. So far there have been no studies that have assessed these three weather generators for climate in South Korea, or with the seasonal climate forecast.

The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Climate Center (APCC) recently developed a 6-month lead multi-model ensemble (MME) prediction system based on the prediction information produced by six operational coupled general circulation models (GCMs) through cooperation with six research institutes in Korea, USA and Australia. The weather generators could be bridges for linking APCC seasonal climate prediction and crop models to generate daily weather data to provide real-time simulation of crop growth and assessment of crop productivity. The objective of the study is to test and compare three commonly used weather generators at 21 sites in major rice production areas in South Korea. The statistical tests are used to evaluate the variety of different weather characteristics of observed and synthetic weather data, such as the distribution of precipitation, maximum temperature and extreme temperature. In general, three generators could generate well in temperatures, and Lars-WG is better at producing extreme temperature.