Articles
THE AGRO-CLIMATE APPLICATION INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR CROP PRODUCTION AND PROTECTION IN EGYPT
Article number
582_2
Pages
41 – 51
Language
English
Abstract
Agricultural activities are closely related to weather factors.
The climate of a
given region determinate the type of crops, management systems, and finally the cash
return of the unit area of the land.
The effect of climatic factors on agriculture and
natural resource management is evident.
Not only the macroclimate that affect agri-culture,
but also it is strongly affected by the microclimatic variation.
Climatic factors
affect the crop water requirements, time of cultivation, length of crop stand in the
field, tolerance to pests and diseases, economic viability of agricultural production,
and finally the total yield and product quality.
The start point of any agricultural
development is to understand the prevailing climate.
The measurement of climatic
data as well as the quality control of such data is the corner stone of the utilization
processes.
It is a costly operation and involves the utilization of a state of the art tech-nology.
Taking the case of Egypt, distribution uniformity of irrigation water and fer-tilizers,
pests and diseases prediction, and planting dates are major problems under
different climatic regions in Egypt.
Uneven field surface, short furrows or small basin,
losses by deep percolation, and fertilizer losses through soil profile characterize the
old land.
Such conditions affect water and fertilizer distribution efficiency.
Early plant-ing
is one of the options for summer-cultivated crops in order to get the maximum
economical yield at harvesting.
Early prediction for diseases and insects is important
to help the farmers avoiding heavy spray of pesticides and take necessary actions to
avoid diseases.
The use of climatic data could help in providing tools for proper man-agement.
The Central Laboratory for Agricultural Climate (CLAC) was established
in the Agricultural Research Center in Egypt to provide information on the accurate
irrigation scheduling that reduces the cost of irrigation and minimizes problems re-lated
to the misuse of water.
Early pest and disease forecast and warnings allow suit-able
time for taking necessary actions to avoid chemical spray.
Proper calculation of
sowing dates ensures uniform plantation and reduces the cost of sowing seeds in sev-eral
crops.
The above mentioned agricultural management practices require real time
weather data system covering the country.
The system covers more than 33
agrometeorological stations.
The data is collected automatically or manually, stored
on a database, and utilized by several models and knowledge based systems.
The dis-semination
of information occurs through different mass media facilities as well as a
web page.
Agricultural decision support system with mathematical and logical models
is linked with a Geographical Information System (GIS) to provide tools for planning
the land utilization and resource management options.
The climate of a
given region determinate the type of crops, management systems, and finally the cash
return of the unit area of the land.
The effect of climatic factors on agriculture and
natural resource management is evident.
Not only the macroclimate that affect agri-culture,
but also it is strongly affected by the microclimatic variation.
Climatic factors
affect the crop water requirements, time of cultivation, length of crop stand in the
field, tolerance to pests and diseases, economic viability of agricultural production,
and finally the total yield and product quality.
The start point of any agricultural
development is to understand the prevailing climate.
The measurement of climatic
data as well as the quality control of such data is the corner stone of the utilization
processes.
It is a costly operation and involves the utilization of a state of the art tech-nology.
Taking the case of Egypt, distribution uniformity of irrigation water and fer-tilizers,
pests and diseases prediction, and planting dates are major problems under
different climatic regions in Egypt.
Uneven field surface, short furrows or small basin,
losses by deep percolation, and fertilizer losses through soil profile characterize the
old land.
Such conditions affect water and fertilizer distribution efficiency.
Early plant-ing
is one of the options for summer-cultivated crops in order to get the maximum
economical yield at harvesting.
Early prediction for diseases and insects is important
to help the farmers avoiding heavy spray of pesticides and take necessary actions to
avoid diseases.
The use of climatic data could help in providing tools for proper man-agement.
The Central Laboratory for Agricultural Climate (CLAC) was established
in the Agricultural Research Center in Egypt to provide information on the accurate
irrigation scheduling that reduces the cost of irrigation and minimizes problems re-lated
to the misuse of water.
Early pest and disease forecast and warnings allow suit-able
time for taking necessary actions to avoid chemical spray.
Proper calculation of
sowing dates ensures uniform plantation and reduces the cost of sowing seeds in sev-eral
crops.
The above mentioned agricultural management practices require real time
weather data system covering the country.
The system covers more than 33
agrometeorological stations.
The data is collected automatically or manually, stored
on a database, and utilized by several models and knowledge based systems.
The dis-semination
of information occurs through different mass media facilities as well as a
web page.
Agricultural decision support system with mathematical and logical models
is linked with a Geographical Information System (GIS) to provide tools for planning
the land utilization and resource management options.
Authors
A.F. Abou-Hadid
Keywords
agrometeorology, databases, modeling, weather
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