GMET in Bolivia: building gridded climate datasets for water resource studies

This briefing describes the first application of the Gridded Meteorological Ensemble Tool (GMET) outside the United States, used by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) in Bolivia to support a national water balance study. The project focused on creating continuous climate datasets from sparse station data and transferring the technical capacity to local Bolivian experts.

• The Gridded Meteorological Ensemble Tool (GMET), developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) with the US Army Corps of Engineers and the University of Washington, creates continuous gridded climate products from station data and uniquely incorporates prediction errors and uncertainty into its analysis.
• In its first application outside the US, SEI used a database of more than 400 stations to generate daily climate grids for Bolivia and parts of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Peru for the period 1980 to 2016.
• The application of GMET in Bolivia demonstrated that while the tool realistically represents precipitation and temperature patterns in areas with sufficient station density, data-sparse regions still require the fusion of satellite-based data to fill gaps and complete water balance calculations.
• The project emphasized technology transfer and local capacity building, training Bolivian experts via the Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics (LFA) to use R software and the Linux operating system to run and update the open-source GMET tool.

APA

Wickel, B. (., & Escobar, M. (2019). GMET in Bolivia: building gridded climate datasets for water resource studies. Stockholm Environment Institute. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/gmet-in-bolivia.pdf

Chicago

Wickel, Bart (A.J.), and Marisa Escobar. GMET in Bolivia: building gridded climate datasets for water resource studies. Stockholm Environment Institute, 2019. https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/gmet-in-bolivia.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Wickel |first1=Bart (A.J.) |last2=Escobar |first2=Marisa |title=GMET in Bolivia: building gridded climate datasets for water resource studies |publisher=Stockholm Environment Institute |date=February 2019 |url=https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/gmet-in-bolivia.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{wickel2019gmet, author = {Wickel, Bart (A.J.) and Escobar, Marisa}, title = {{GMET in Bolivia: building gridded climate datasets for water resource studies}}, institution = {Stockholm Environment Institute}, year = {2019}, month = feb, url = {https://www.sei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/gmet-in-bolivia.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }