Forest climatology: estimation and use of daily climatological data for Bavaria, Germany

Long-term daily climatological data are important to study forest damage and simulate tree growth, but they are scarce in forested areas because observational records are often scarce. At the eight Bavarian forest sites, we examined six interpolation methods and established empirical transfer functions relating observed forest climate data to the climate data of German weather stations. Based on our comparisons, a technique is developed and used to reconstruct 31-year daily forest climatological data at six forest sites. The reconstructed climate data were then used to calculate four meteorological stress factors which are of importance to forest studies. Finally, the uncertainties, temporal and spatial variation of these stress factors were discussed.