Resource information
One of the major constraints for the
improvement of agricultural risk management in Central
America, and in particular to the development of weather
index-based insurance, is the availability of complete
meteorological data. Limitations with the data are related
to restrictions in weather station coverage (density), and
problems with the quality (errors and gaps in the
information) and availability of historical records. This
paper evaluates the reconstruction of historical
meteorological records with gridded datasets for Honduras
and Guatemala1 using the methodology in Uribe Alcantara et
al. (2009).The reconstruction with synthetic series is
implemented by replacing missing observations with
estimations from regular grids (or gridded analyses). The
development of synthetic series proposed here will
facilitate, among other potential uses, the implementation
of risk analysis in insurance contracts where meteorological
information is limited or incomplete. This paper is
organized in four sections. Section one describes the
conceptual approach and methods implemented for the
evaluation of the data and the development of the gridded
analysis. Section two describes the results of the
implementation of the gridded analysis for Honduras and
Guatemala. Section three provides a brief description of
possible applications of the regular grids for the
development of weather insurance contracts. Section four
summarizes the main conclusions.
