PREFACE

This WOFOST/CGMS documentation is based on the WOFOST 6.0 documentation prepared by I. Supit, A.A. Hooijer and C.A. van Diepen which on its turn was based on published papers, research reports and source code of earlier WOFOST versions. The motive to bring out this publication was:

• the original WOFOST 6.0 system description did not describe the relation between the Crop Growth Monitoring System (CGMS) and the crop growth simulation module WOFOST 6.0
• it contained errors
• the method to obtain, interpolate and subsequently introduce the weather variables into the crop growth simulation routine was not adequately described
• the original WOFOST 6.0 documentation is out of print

The authors attempted to correct the errors and added a chapter on CGMS, which explains its operation, describes the required data, the applied methods to obtain these data and furthermore, the prediction model as applied by the European Commission is explained.

Within CGMS the WOFOST output is used as a basis for monitoring the quality of the agricultural season over the whole EU territory and for yield forecasting per administrative region. WOFOST 6.0 was developed by Alterra (formerly the DLO-Winand Staring Centre, SC-DLO) jointly with Plant Research International (formerly the Research Institute for Agrobiology and Soil Fertility, AB-DLO) in Wageningen for the Joint Research Centre (JRC-Ispra Site) of the Commission of the European Communities under contract 3965-90-04 ED ISP-NL "Yield Forecasting Models, Part II" (SC project 7185) and 4436-91-08 ED ISP NL " Crop specific agrometeorological simulation models" (SC Project 7220). CGMS is one of the products of Action 3 of the JRC pilot project for the Application of Remote Sensing to Agricultural Statistics, also called Agriculture Project, or MARS project. This project is carried out by the Agricultural Information Systems Unit of the Institute for Remote Sensing Applications of JRC, in support to the Statistical Office of the EU (EUROSTAT) and to the Directorate-General for Agriculture of the EU (DGVI).

As decribed in SC-DLO Technical Document 52 by H.L Boogard, C.A van Diepen, R.P. Rötter, J.M.C.A. Carbera and H.H. van Laar, WOFOST (version 7.1) can also be used as a stand alone model. Other WOFOST documentation includes a user guide and a concise system description, to be published as Alterra Technical Documents, which are supplemented by documents on the Fortran Simulation Environment (FSE), the subroutine library TTUTIL, and the CABO weather documentation, all published by Plant Research International in the series "CABO-TT simulation reports".

Source code of the original CGMS version, written in Fortran and SQL has been redesigned and rewritten in C++ by E. van der Goot and G. Cifani. CGMS (executable only) can be downloaded from ftp.ais.sai.jrc.it by anonymous ftp, directory /public/erik/CGMS/NEW.

I. Supit

E. van der Goot