SORGHUM YIELD MODELING BASED ON CROP GROWTH-PARAMETERS DETERMINED FROM VISIBLE AND NEAR-IR CHANNEL NOAA AVHRR DATA

The normalized difference vegetation indices (NDVIs) deduced from multi-date NOAA-11 AVHRR/2 Local Area Coverage data have been used to generate growth profiles of 1989 90 Rabi (winter) sorghum in the tehsils of the three major sorghum growing districts, Ahmadnagar, Pune and Solapur, in Central Maharashtra, India. Spatially large and contiguous sorghum cultivation sites have been used to characterize sorghum. The crop growth equation suggested by Badhwar was used to model profiles. The tehsil average yields were regressed on the growth parameters, including senescence rate in early postanthesis period for enabling pre-harvest forecasting (in model-1), and area under the complete growth profile (in model-2). The model-1 enables issuing of pre-harvest forecast of yields at least 45 days in advance.