The role of climate normals in crop specific weather forecasts

Crop specific weather forecasts for risk advisories in the US have been developed for a number of crops. We take the first steps toward increasing transferability of models across regions and crop systems by reducing the overall number of model inputs and substituting readily available climate data for spatial relationship variables which had to be individually calculated regionally in previous incarnations. We use a rigorously tested potato late blight model from the north central US for our analysis. Models that incorporate climate normals produce statistically similar results to models that use spatio-temporal markers. The relationship between models that incorporate climatology and those that do not varies depending on forecast length and the month of the forecast.