Wheat yield forecast using detrended yield over a sub-humid climatic environment in five districts of Uttar Pradesh, India

A study was carried out to forecast the yield of the wheat crop for five districts of Uttar Pradesh namely Lucknow, Kanpur, Banda, Jhansi and Faizabad. The daily weather data on variables such as maximum temperature, rainfall, minimum temperature, and relative humidity were arranged week wise from sowing to harvesting and the relations between the weather variables and yield was worked out using statistical tools like correlation and regression. The yield has been detrended by obtaining the parameter estimates of the model and subsequently the detrended yield was used to forecast the yield of the crop using ARIMA model. The proposed method of obtaining pre-harvest forecasting of yield of crops was compared with the traditional approaches of forecasting and the proposed method was evaluated in terms of criteria’s such as goodness of fit of the model. It was observed that in all the districts the proposed model performed better as compared to the traditional method both in terms of goodness of fit as well as forecasting performance. Thus it can be concluded that the proposed approach is better and more suitable as compared to the traditional approach for forecasting the wheat yield in the five districts of Uttar Pradesh