Local agro forecast — what information does it give us?

With the help of a local agroforecast, each farmer can monitor the climate in his field, understand when is the most appropriate period for the different treatments and plan them more precisely, saving time and resources. Climate is one of the factors that most strongly influence the organization and execution of agricultural treatments, but thanks to the weather stations of Pessl Instruments, farmers can be one step ahead of the changeable weather.What does the personal agroforecast give us? Through a weather station installed on the farm or on their field, farmers receive a detailed 7-day local weather forecast. The personal agroforecast provides farmers with accurate information on the most appropriate time for spraying, fertilizing and harvesting, presented at hourly intervals. Additionally, farmers can monitor instantaneous climate data such as rainfall, temperature, wind speed, soil moisture and temperature, and more, as well as use models to predict plant diseases, which assess the likelihood of developing diseases in different types of crops and make it possible to take timely measures.How agroforecasting helps the farmers? Data from the weather station is automatically sent every hour to a server that is accessible from the platform www.fieldclimate.com. In addition to it, a mobile application is available to farmers, in which the most important information about the flight time is visualized in a convenient form. The information from the local agroforecast allows farmers to:

• plan sowing, spraying, fertilizing, harvesting more easily and accurately, taking into account the most suitable climatic conditions for carrying out the corresponding treatment;
• prevent the development of crop diseases and save resources by spraying less and only when necessary;
• estimate when and at what rate to water, according to the forecast of the amount of expected or fallen rainfall;
• improve the process of planning and organizing work on the farm.

What does it take to have a local agroforecast and how is it calculated? The local weather forecast is a combination of hardware and software, and in order to take advantage of the advantages it gives, farmers need a weather station with the iMetos brand, manufactured by the Austrian company Pessl Instruments and from a computer or mobile device with an Internet connection.The weather station iMetos collects information about the climate in the location, in som er placeret. This information is calculated using specialized algorithms developed by Meteoblue, as a result of which in the mobile application and the FieldClimate platform farmers see the weather forecast on their farm. Meteoblue uses its own models based on meso-scale modeling. The models were developed at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and quickly became popular with meteorologists, pilots and astronomers. At the base are mesoscale and multi-scale climate models that use resolutions between 30 km and 3 km, depending on the complexity of weather phenomena and the topography in the area.The instantaneous data collected by the weather station and analyzed by Meteoblue algorithms allow reaching 85% accuracy for the first 24 hours of the 7-day forecast. After 1 year of using the station in the same place and accumulating historical weather data in the respective location, the accuracy of the agro-forecast reaches more than 90%.Contact your nearest NIK representative to find out more about Pessl weather stations and personal agro-forecasting or to purchase a weather station for your farm.