Monthly Weather Forecasts in a Pest Forecasting Context: Downscaling, Recalibration, and Skill Improvement

Abstract

onthly weather forecasts (MOFCs) were shown to have skill in extratropical continental regions for lead times up to 3 weeks, in particular for temperature and if weekly averaged. This skill could be exploited in practical applications for implementations exhibiting some degree of memory or inertia toward meteorological drivers, potentially even for longer lead times. Many agricultural applications fall into these categories because of the temperature-dependent development of biological organisms, allowing simulations that are based on temperature sums. Most such agricultural models require local weather information at daily or even hourly temporal resolution, however, preventing direct use of the spatially and temporally aggregated information of MOFCs, which may furthermore be subject to significant biases. By the example of forecasting the timing of life-phase occurrences of the codling moth (Cydia pomonella), which is a major insect pest in apple orchards worldwide, the authors investigate the application of downscaled weekly temperature anomalies of MOFCs for use in an impact model requiring hourly input. The downscaling and postprocessing included the use of a daily weather generator and a resampling procedure for creating hourly weather series and the application of a recalibration technique to correct for the original underconfidence of the forecast occurrences of codling moth life phases. Results show a clear skill improvement of up to 3 days in root-mean-square error over the full forecast range when incorporating MOFCs as compared with deterministic benchmark forecasts using climatological information for predicting the timing of codling moth life phases.