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NASA/POWER and DailyGridded weather datasets—how good they are for estimating maize yields in Brazil?

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A Correction to this article was published on 20 December 2019

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Abstract

The low availability of high-quality meteorological data resulted in the development of synthetic meteorological data generated by satellite or data interpolation, which are available in grids with varying spatio-temporal resolution. Among these different data sources, NASA/POWER and DailyGridded databases have been applied for crop yield simulations. The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of these two datasets, in different time scales (daily, 10-day, monthly, and annual), as input data for estimating potential (YP) and attainable (YA) maize yields, using the FAO Agroecological Zone crop simulation model (FAO-AEZ), properly calibrated and validated. For that, daily weather data from ten Brazilian locations were collected and compared to the data extracted from NASA/POWER and DailyGridded systems and later applied to estimate the potential and attainable maize yields. DailyGridded data showed a better performance than NASA/POWER for all weather variables and time scales, with confidence index (C) ranging from 0.52 to 0.99 for the former and from 0.09 and 0.99 for the latter. As a consequence of that, DailyGridded data was better than NASA/POWER to estimate maize yields with estimates close to those obtained with observed data, with a lower mean absolute errors (< 30 kg ha−1) and a higher confidence index (C = 0.99).

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Change history

  • 20 December 2019

    The original article was published with errors found in the “Material and Methods” section, as well as the “Results and Discussion” section and Tables 5 and 6.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biosystems Engineering, Agricultural College Luiz de Queiroz (ESALQ), University of São Paulo, Avenida Pádua Dias, 11, Piracicaba, SP, 13418-900, Brazil

    Yury C. N. Duarte & Paulo C. Sentelhas

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  1. Yury C. N. Duarte
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  2. Paulo C. Sentelhas
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Correspondence to Paulo C. Sentelhas.

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Duarte, Y.C.N., Sentelhas, P.C. NASA/POWER and DailyGridded weather datasets—how good they are for estimating maize yields in Brazil?. Int J Biometeorol 64, 319–329 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-019-01810-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-019-01810-1

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