microclimOz: hourly estimates of historical above and below ground microclimates for Australia

Many problems in pure and applied ecology require the quantification of above and below ground microclimates. Here I describe a dataset of hourly microclimates for the Australian continent, simulated from the years 1990 to 2017 across a grid of 1893 locations. The data were generated with the NicheMapR microclimate model, driven by 0.05° gridded daily meteorological forcing data (AWAP), 0.025° elevation and 0.008° soil texture data. The above ground variables include horizontal plane solar radiation, solar zenith angle, sky temperature (from which down-welling longwave radiation can be computed) and 1 cm and 120 cm height air temperature, relative humidity and wind speed. The below ground variables include soil temperature, pore humidity, soil moisture and soil water potential for 0, 2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 50, 100 and 200 cm below ground. The computations are for four shade levels (0, 50, 70 and 90%). The data set can be used for a wide variety of applications, including the computation of heat and water budgets of organisms, the potential for vegetation growth, and the development of biologically-inspired indices.