WINETECH Technical Yearbook 2021

SUMMARY TerraClim provides spatially-explicit, up-to-date climatic data that is critical for informing agricultural decision making in the Western Cape. The TerraClim extent has expanded to cover 33% of the Western Cape and 97.9% of wine grape vineyards based on novel regionality research, with results that ensure improved accuracies and significantly faster processing times per hectare. TerraClim hosts multiple data resources into a central database with a user-friendly interface that allows users to obtain pertinent information about climate, terrain and soil to aid long- and short-term agricultural decision making, building resilience in the face of climate uncertainty in the Western Cape. A range of data products are provided. For example, air temperature is measured at hundreds of weather stations and converted to temperature maps (climatic layers) covering several agricultural regions in the province. These maps, generated at a spatial resolution of up to two metres, are frequently (e.g. hourly) updated. Various value-added climatic products, including growing degree days, accumulated cold units and extreme temperature events, are continuously generated. These products can be viewed, interrogated and downloaded through a user-friendly web application. Reports on the historical and current climatic and topographic characteristics of a particular agricultural field, orchard or vineyard can be generated and printed/downloaded. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Centre for Geographical Analysis (CGA), namely Prof. Van Niekerk, G. Stephenson, C. Theron, A. Prins, T. Pauw and Z. Mouton.

FIGURE 6. Shows an example of the new suitability tool developed, the main window of the website displays the suitability study extent (left), the tool has three main functions that return a suitability recommendation. The user can draw a new polygon/field, select a previously drawn polygon/field (middle) or compare two previously drawn polygons/fields with each other (right), which provides a list of recommended cultivars with a summary table (quick summary values of the most important variables driving the cultivar recommendation).

For more information, contact Tara Southey at tara@sun.ac.za or visit www.terraclim.co.za.

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