IMPLEMENTATION OF CLIMAP an‎d GIS FOR MAPPING THE CLIMATIC DATASET OF NORTHERN IRAQ

The main objective of the present study is the construction of air temperature and precipitation maps for the northern of Iraq through the application of contemporary Geographical Information System (GIS) techniques and CLIMAP (CLImate Maps) software. The dataset contains monthly maximum temperatures from meteorological stations located across the entire study area have been collected for the 29-year period 1981–2010. Several remote sensing dataset including Digital Elevation Model (DEM) and Satellite image were used as predictor variables for GIS interpolation process. The output set of climatic maps at 90m resolution were display the maximum temperatures for each months in the applied period for the entire study area. The maps show that, the climatic features depends on number of the distributed meteorological stations, relief and the topographic structures of the study area. The results also show that techniques using elevation as additional information improve the prediction results considerably. Climatic variables and database provide an essential input for crop growth simulation models.