Meteorological data for agricultural applications

Many agricultural applications are based on meteorological data. For example estimation of surface moisture, crop yield or forecasting of outbreak of crop diseases or insect pests is largely dependent on meteorological conditions. To ensure that there continuously is a (in spite of changes in meteorological observing network) spatially and temporally adequate amount of meteorological data available a system was taken into use in Finland, where parameters measured at observation stations are first interpolated onto a 10 km x 10 km grid. The data is stored as grid square values in a database and calculations are made using this gridded data. The spatial interpolation method currently used at the Finnish Meteorological Institute is known as kriging. The interpolated data has successfully been used in several agricultural applications. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.