DURACIÓN ÓPTIMA DE UNA MEDICIÓN DE HUMEDAD RELATIVA PARA SIMPLIFICAR EL TRABAJO DE CAMPO EN CLIMA TROPICAL

Abstract

When data loggers are used in research projects, the tendency to register temperatures and humidity for more days than the minimum necessary is frequent. The objective is to reduce the fieldwork and for this purpose, we study the optimum interval for the duration of the monitoring campaigns in the absence of stations of the equatorial zone. We initially worked with relative humidity records because they are the series that show greater daily variability according to whether there is rain or not. A work in progress is exploring the optimal duration for the dry bulb temperature, with the future purpose of comparing the results with those of this study. From reference series with humidity data collected during a full year, the uncertainty that would be generated by working with shorter sub-series of data was calculated, in comparison with complete series processing. Three different ways of selecting the data were compared and the loss in precision that this economy of resources would generate was made, using several hygrometric parameters. It is concluded that in the absence of severe climatic anomalies such as Niño or Niña, and depending on how the measurement campaigns are programmed, it will be sufficient to measure relative humidity in a period between 6 and 56 days to obtain values with a 95% similarity compared to the results that would have been obtained of having measured continuously for a whole year.