Climate protocols for controlled environment experiments
End-to-end design, generation and delivery of physically consistent hourly climate protocols, tailored to your experimental question and facility.
A climate protocol is the backbone of a controlled environment experiment: it fixes the climate the canopy, soil and root systems actually experience, hour by hour, for the whole run. For us, it is a research output in its own right, designed with the client, generated from very large stochastic ensembles, and conditioned to the facility that will reproduce it.
Our workflow combines a close collaboration with the research team with our in-house toolchain (SAGE, DELPHI, VANE). This lets us move fluently between what the experiment needs to answer and what a physically plausible year of weather can offer, and to iterate quickly until the protocol is both scientifically meaningful and operationally realistic.
- 01Hourly multivariate time-series (precipitation, temperature, radiation, humidity, wind, and derived indices)
- 02Documentation of the climate rationale, criteria, and screening results
- 03Facility-conditioned protocol files ready for the ecotron control system
- 04Optional companion ensembles for statistical context or replicates
From client brief to experiment-ready protocol
We start every project by mapping the experiment together: scientific questions, crops, soil columns, equipment, duration, key timings and measurements. From this we propose several conceptual routes for the climate protocol and agree on the design that best serves the experiment.
We source the observational and reanalysis data needed to represent the target climate, calibrate SAGE for the location, and generate very large multivariate ensembles, up to one million synthetic years of physically consistent hourly weather.
We reproject the present-day ensemble onto the requested future climate using DELPHI. Several state-of-the-art methods are supported (scenario means, storyline corners, IPCC AR6 Global Warming Levels) and chosen to match the scientific question.
We use VANE to explore the ensemble and identify the years that best match the multivariate criteria and thresholds defined with the client: heat, drought, radiation, compound events, or bespoke composite indices.
We iterate with the client on a short list of candidate years, then export the final hourly series. Where needed, the time-series are post-processed to respect facility constraints: minimum resolvable precipitation, per-variable min/max envelopes, ramp-rate limits. The protocol is then ready to run.
- 0101Scoping with the client
We start every project by mapping the experiment together: scientific questions, crops, soil columns, equipment, duration, key timings and measurements. From this we propose several conceptual routes for the climate protocol and agree on the design that best serves the experiment.
- 0202Data sourcing & ensemble generation
We source the observational and reanalysis data needed to represent the target climate, calibrate SAGE for the location, and generate very large multivariate ensembles, up to one million synthetic years of physically consistent hourly weather.
- 0303Futurisation of the ensemble
We reproject the present-day ensemble onto the requested future climate using DELPHI. Several state-of-the-art methods are supported (scenario means, storyline corners, IPCC AR6 Global Warming Levels) and chosen to match the scientific question.
- 0404Candidate year screening
We use VANE to explore the ensemble and identify the years that best match the multivariate criteria and thresholds defined with the client: heat, drought, radiation, compound events, or bespoke composite indices.
- 0505Iteration, export & hardware conditioning
We iterate with the client on a short list of candidate years, then export the final hourly series. Where needed, the time-series are post-processed to respect facility constraints: minimum resolvable precipitation, per-variable min/max envelopes, ramp-rate limits. The protocol is then ready to run.
Bring us your experimental question.
The best protocols come from the earliest conversations. Reach out with a sketch of the setup and the scientific question, and we will propose a design.
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