Generic calibration of a simple model of diurnal temperature variations for spatial analysis of accumulated degree-days

Accumulated growing degree-days (aGDD) are widely used to predict phenological stages of plants and insects. It has been shown in the past that the best predictive performance is obtained when aGDD are computed from hourly temperature data. As the latter are not always available, models of diurnal temperature changes are often employed to retrieve the required information from data of daily minimum and maximum temperatures. In this study, we examine the performance of a well-known model of hourly temperature variations in the context of a spatial assessment of aGDD. Specifically, we examine whether a generic calibration of such a temperature model is sufficient to infer in a reliable way spatial patterns of key phenological stages across the complex territory of Switzerland. Temperature data of a relatively small number of meteorological stations is used to obtain a generic model parameterization, which is first compared with site-specific calibrations. We show that, at the local scale, the predictive skill of the generic model does not significantly differ from that of the site-specific models. We then show that for aGDD up to 800 °C d (on a base temperature of 10 °C), phenological dates predicted with aGDD obtained from estimated hourly temperature data are within ± 3 days of dates estimated on the basis of observed hourly temperatures. This suggests the generic calibration of hourly temperature models is indeed a valid approach for pre-processing temperature data in regional studies of insect and plant phenology. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s00484-017-1471-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.