It is possible to use spatially interpolated meteorological fields or time series of 2D grids to extract meteorological time series for a set of points. This is handled as "virtual stations" since the data will seem to originate from these virtual stations points where no station is present. This obviously comes at the cost of much higher run times.
The data from real input stations (as read by the plugin defined with the METEO key in the [input] section) is filtered/processed, temporally interpolated and spatially interpolated as defined in the configuration file. Then time series are reconstructed from these grids at a set of defined points. This behavior is configured by the following keys (in the [Input] section):
Currently, a DEM also has to be provided since this will be used to retrieve the elevation, slope and azimuth of the virtual stations.
In the example provided below, 4 stations provide the original data that will be spatially interpolated at 2 points (virtual stations) for 7 meteorological parameters. Every 6 hours, with starting offset of on hour, the original data will be spatially interpolated (so at 01:00, 07:00, 13:00 and 19:00). Any data requested at other time steps will be temporally resampled from the spatially interpolated data.
The meteorological time series are extracted from time series of user-provided grids. therefore a plugin for 2D grids must have been defined (with the GRID2D key in the [Input] section). The following keys control this downscaling process:
Currently, a DEM has to be provided in order to check the position of the stations and the consistency of the grids.