Using of GIS Software for Mapping the Climatic Data Obtained from Internet Network: Iraq Case Study

Abstract

Nowadays, the long-term climatic data supplied by the famous internet sites, plays an important role in analyzing and mapping of various climatic features (temperature, precipitation, solar radiation ... etc.). Precipitation is one of the important elements in agriculture. It is a major field in climatological studies. Studying precipitation is important to identify precipitation characteristics; temporal and spatial variability. In the present study, extract for each (0.5*0.5) degree grid cell of the monthly precipitation data for the year 2016 except the summer months (June July August) using the GPCC Visualizer website is applied for Iraq country. Kriging interpolation method within the environment of ArcGIS10.3 program, the average monthly and seasonal precipitation maps are drawn. The study revealed the possibility to use the more popular website sources of historical climate datasets to compensate the lack of climate data available from the meteorological stations in Iraq, which is often difficult to obtain recent data.