Weather and Crops: Data for Analytics

CropProphet has released CropProphet Weather, a data set to enable analytics of the impact weather has on agriculture.

Weather plays a very important role in agriculture.   Weather conditions impact a wide range of the agriculture industry.  The impacts of weather help to determine when and what crops a producer decides to plant when chemicals and fertilizers are applied.  On the other end of the spectrum, weather conditions determine how much supply of a specific crop occurs each year.  In fact, CropProphet is designed to provide daily-updated corn yield forecasts but also soybean yield forecasts, winter-wheat yield forecasts.

Unlike other providers, the CropProphet crop production models are driven almost exclusively by weather conditions.  Our 40-year history of weather and crop data are used to create a sophisticated machine-learning-based agricultural production forecast system. The weather data and information used to create these forecasts are now available as an offering to our customers.   Customers who quantitatively analyze crop production and forecast information can now build their own models using the CropProphet Weather data feed.

An example of the data is shown below.   The 2012 summer in the United States was very hot and dry and cause significant impacts on corn and soybean yields.

The animation above shows the June, July, and August growing degree days difference from normal.   Red is higher than normal growing degree days and blue is lower than normal growing degree days.  Very high growing degree day differences from normal can negatively impact corn and soybeans.

CropProphet Weather – The Offer

The variables available include:

Agriculture Weather Data

  1. Maximum Temperature
  2. Minimum Temperature
  3. Average Temperature
  4. Precipitation
  5. Growing degree days

and other variables designed to enable you to model the impact of weather on crops in the United States.

The CropProphet Weather product includes access to digital data files including:

  1. An archive of daily data from 1981 to the present day (see animation above)
  2. A daily updated data feed (with one day delay) to ensure your data is up to date.
  3. Daily updated weather forecasts for each of the variables for 15 days.  The models used include NOAA’s; Global Forecast System (GFS) and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting

USDA NASS Data

Retrieving data from the USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service can be frustrating.  To enable customers to start their modeling efforts quickly, the CropProphet Weather offer includes USDA NASS data in easy to use CSV formats.

The data includes:

  1. End of season yield and production estimates
  2. Crop prospective planting and planting acreage reports
  3. Crop condition and crop progress reports.  An example of the 2019 US Corn Planted Progress is shown below.

USDA NASS: Corn Planted Progress

Weather and Crops Data for Modeling

At CropProphet, we use this weather data to create our corn yield forecasts. Customers can use this data to conduct their own crop machine-learning-based production modeling and attempt to create the 2012 corn yield forecast, shown below.

Weather and Crops: The Ultimate Test

Croprophet provides customers with systematically created, hype-free corn and soybean yield/production forecasts.  Our objective is to provide the best possible end-of-season yield and production forecast possible.   Following the growing degree data from 2012 we show above, it’s only natural for us to also show the corn yield forecast for 2012 as well.

Request more information about CropProphet Weather today.