Assessing the information in crop model and meteorological indicators to forecast crop yield over Europe

The MARS-Crop Yield Forecasting System (M-CYFS) is used since 1993 to forecast the yields of all major crops in the European Union (EU) based on gridded runs of the WOFOST crop model. Using 28 years of observation, from 1988 to 2015, we quantified the variability in crop yield reported by all 28 EU Member States (MS) that can be explained by each individual WOFOST crop model based predictors and a few simple meteorological variables. A linear...