Climate Estimates and Plant-Climate Relationships
Get Climate-FVS Ready Data

Introduction

Climate-FVS is a modification to the Forest Vegetation Simulator, a stand dynamics model generally used to support forest planning, project analysis, and silvicultural prescription preparation.

Climate-FVS reads an input a data file created from using this web page. The file includes derived variables like those available from the Custom Climate Data Request page plus relevant species-climate profile scores described on the Species-Climate Profiles page. The data for all GCM and SRES scenarios and for all time slices that are available are included automatically. Users select which ones to use in Climate-FVS projections in that software, not here.

NOTE: These data are only available for Western United States (excluding Alaska, longitude -125 to -102 and latitude 31 to 51 degrees).

How it Works

  1. You prepare a file of locations for which Climate-FVS-ready data are produced. Normally, each location represents one stand, "setting", or point and is labeled as a "PointID". These point data have 3 or 4 columns coded as space separated values (commas and tabs also work) with these fields: PointID, Long, Lat (decimal degrees), and optionally, Elevation (meters). If you do not include a header record, then the order of the columns must be PointID, Long, Lat, Elev. If Elev is missing (for any or all points), it will be estimated from USGS 1-arc second elevation data.

    If you include a header record, the name you supply for the first field will be replaced with "PointID"; the PointID column must be the first column. The other column names are matched using the following rules: a name with "lat" is the latitude (case insensitive), a name with "lon" is the longitude, and a name with "ele" is the elevation.

    If a PointID includes blank(s), enclose it in quotation marks. Example line: "Moscow ID" -117.0 46.73 787.3

    File extension is normally .txt, however you may compress your file so that the extension is .zip (implies a zip file) or .gz (implies a gzip file).
  2. You specify an Email address we can use to contact you.
  3. You specify the data file to send our site.
  4. Our server processes the request and builds a zip file of the output data.
  5. Our server sends you an Email with links included that you can use to retrieve the data you requested. You are given 48 hours to recover your data from the time the Email message is sent. Short runs take 5 to 10 mins, long runs can take an hour or two.
  6. Once you get the answers.zip file, copy the file named FVSClimAttrs.csv to the FVS data directory for your simulations.

See: New Algorithms Used For Some Derived Variables

Input Form for Climate-FVS Ready Data