Weather Services Advance Precision Agriculture

Some estimates suggest over half of growers’ activities are impacted by weather conditions, from field workability to fertility management to harvest timing, writes Lisa Heacox on PrecisionAg.com. No wonder more companies are entering the weather data and analysis space, either with standalone products or by teaming up with other firms’ management and grower platforms.

The data and modeling here are challenging — one expert called weather data “unstructured and complex” — but here is a sampling of what companies are doing to help guide farmers’ and retailers’ weather-based decisions.

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Gathering The Data

All companies in this segment draw from large and varied sources of live, raw weather data that can include temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, wind speed, etc. Feeds can come from national — and increasingly, global — networks, public and private. Information is also tapped from radar, meteorological satellites, surface weather stations, rain gauge networks and forecast models.

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No one data source can provide the depth of information needed for more intense agricultural use.

For instance, radar can show where rain is, but it measures moisture far above the ground. Those totals can differ quite a bit from what actually hits a field, points out Brad Colman, Weather Science Lead with Climate Corp. For its FieldView platform, the company combines the best data from radar networks (NOAA) with “as many rain gauges as we can get our hands on,” he says.

Climate Corp.’s rainfall data feeds come as an average precipitation measurement for a grid of roughly one-third of a square mile. “We then match those grids up to farmers’ fields. We receive our first estimate of precipitation 15 minutes after the hour; then, as more data is received, we update the readings with additional quality-controlled values,” he explains.

In fact, in 2017, Climate Corp. developed a novel method using “machine learning” to more intelligently incorporate rain gauge data into its model. This new method has improved previous issues by more than 45%.

Read more at PrecisionAg.com.

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