French agroclimatic research network dataset

The AgroClim dataset includes multi-decade long time-series of daily and hourly data from weather stations composed by the same twelve instruments at 54 sites throughout the French territory, including Corsica, Guyana and Guadeloupe. A large diversity of INRAE research projects benefited from the reliable climatological data from this dataset for decades. Now that the dataset is provided in open access for all, this paper describes the acquisition methods and maintenance that ensure the quality of the data. This data can contribute to enlarge observatories and observation datasets or assimilated, for producing reanalysis dataset, and ultimately used for validation of earth system simulations. Furthermore, this dataset contains rarely available measures as leaf wetness duration and soil temperature at 10 and 50 cm depths, which are useful for crop models and carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycle modelling. Moreover, the sites are located on research experimental sites, which contain data from long term agronomy experiments and can contribute to the study of a variety of bio-climatological studies.