Use of crop development models in agroclimatic mapping

An example is given from a pilot project on a coherent application of soil and weather data to produce crop security estimates of barley. GIS was used to interpolate daily weather elements from a network of weather stations to individually mapped soil type units, on average less than 1 ha, of arable land. Other model tools are: a soil moisture model to estimate soil drying from the day of snow thaw until sowing date, temperature sum functions to estimate daily advance in phenological development to emergence, heading, and yellow ripeness, and thereafter, a grain moisture model for logging of combine harvesting days, taking also daily precipitation into account. The outcome is probability estimates of getting at least a given number of combining options within a given calendar day.