Centre county Pennsylvania, USA | Adequate precipitation and cooler than normal temps during the Jun to Aug time period on a national scale has produced greatest yield in NASS's 35 year historical national yield data. That suggest that summer weather (or short term climate) is a contributing attribute to national yield. It may even be a major component of yield? High quality national weather and short term climate data is available from another gov agency (NOAA). Will need to find appropriate historical data files in NOAA's servers and figure out how to integrate that data with the NASS national yield and weekly crop condition data.
Both SAS and Minitab are very good commercial statistics packages and both offer hand holding service to users for a fee. I'm using python stats packages to do all analysis and charting. Python is freeware (open license), but offers no hand holding service and requires mastering a very high level dynamic programming language.
The biggest challenge for any 'big data' analysis program is getting and parsing appropriate and sufficient big data files. Both NASS and NOAA have servers that greatly assist in that aspect and their data are very credible. |
2015 corn and soybean CCYM yield prediction update
