Abstract

Making monthly and seasonal climate forecasts potentially useful to farmers and agriculturists remains a major challenge. Beyond their experience, intuition and climatological information, farmers can take advantage of critical seasonal climate forecasts and information that may actually help them with their crop management (i.e. planting, control of pest and diseases) and insurance decisions.

The partnership between the Climate Prediction Center and the Southeast Climate Consortium (SECC) took the challenge made by the NOAA Climate Test Bed (CTB) to use the improved NOAA climate forecast products to help enhance decision making capabilities of farmers and agriculturists in the south eastern United States. Previous research indicated some potential of predicting cotton yields over the southeastern United States based on regional atmospheric circulation in the upper troposphere and surface temperatures. A brief review of the useful teleconnections that were found using NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data and the earlier results of the predictability of cotton yields based on ECHAM 4.5 forecasts but using observed sea surface temperatures will be made. In this study, the ability of NCEP's Coupled Forecast System's (CFS) retrospective forecasts of 500 hPa heights during February to September to hindcast de-trended cotton yields in Alabama and Georgia from 1980 to 2004 is investigated. Possible use of real time CFS forecasts to the cotton yields in the south eastern United States will be explored.

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