In order to facilitate decision making, the agricultural sector needs appropriate climate information that translates the impact of present and future climate on crops and agricultural systems. However, in Quebec, this information was either outdated or hard to find, a situation that was deplored by agricultural stakeholders.
To address this problem, in 2010, the Commission Agrométéorologie of the Centre de référence en agriculture et agroalimentaire du Québec (CRAAQ) teamed up with a number of other organizations to develop the Agroclimatic Atlas of Quebec.
The Agroclimatic Atlas of Quebec is hosted at www.agrometeo.org , a website that agricultural stakeholders already routinely use to find current weather information. A number of the datasets sourced by this website pertain to degree-days, frost-free days, crop heat units, precipitation and potential evapotranspiration data collected and interpolated to a regular grid spacing of 10 km for two thirty year periods, 1974-2003 and 1979-2008.