Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 103 (2000) 59

Agricultural Meteorology: evolution and application

J.L. Monteith
Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Bush Estate, Penicuik EH26 OQB, Midlothian, UK
Received 1 October 1998; received in revised form 20 May 1999; accepted 2 June 1999

Abstract
Attempts to relate agricultural production to weather go back at least 2000 years and are still evolving. Mainly qualitative
studies in the 19th Century were followed by statistical analyses, then by microclimatic measurements and most recently
by modelling. From 1968 onwards, publications in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology chart the progress of research and
major trends. The main body of published work has dealt with the response of crops to climate and microclimate. Much
less attention has been paid to livestock environments and the impact of weather on pests and diseases. Models purporting
to describe the impact on production of climate and climate change have performed erratically when tested against field
measurements. 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Agricultural (and forest) meteorology; History of agricultural meteorology; Trends in agricultural meteorology; Yield models in
agricultural meteorology

1. Introduction agronomist, Fan Sheng-Chih, wrote an account of his

1.1. Early history
Agriculture is an industry even more dependent on
weather than other systems for harnessing biological
resources such as forestry and fishing. Since crops
were first cultivated and livestock reared, farmers have
acknowledged the overriding importance of weather
in setting both potential levels of production related to
sunshine and rainfall and achievable levels that depend
on the severity of droughts, gales and the prevalence
of pests and diseases.
To survive, the earliest farmers must have learned
from experience how to maximize harvests in good
seasons and to minimize losses in bad ones; and
in course of time their tradition and wisdom was
formalized and recorded in simple agricultural hand-
books. In the first century BC, for example, a Chinese
Tel.: +44-131-445-4343; fax: +44-131-445-3943.
experience that was eventually translated into English
under the title On Fan Sheng-Chih Shu An agricul-
turalist book of China (Shih, 1974). Not surprisingly,
the contents are qualitative rather than quantitative
but there are many examples of what we now refer to
as agricultural meteorology. For example, farmers
were advised to compact snow with rollers during
winter and early spring in order to maximize water
stored in the soil after the snow melted. Thereafter,
they could look forward to the time when . . . after
thawing, the breath of earth comes through so the soil
breaks up for the first time. With the summer solstice,
the weather begins to become hot and the yin breath
strengthens. . .
It is salutary to remember that the branch of science
we now refer to as Agricultural Meteorology has its
roots in centuries of experience gathered and organized
by farmers. The first descriptive stage of the subject,
already illustrated by the writing of Fan Sheng-Chih,
dominated the subject for centuries and was still dom-

0168-1923/00/$ see front matter 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 1 6 8 - 1 9 2 3 ( 0 0 ) 0 0 1 1 4 - 3
6 J.L. Monteith / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 103 (2000) 59
inant when Edward Mawley, President of the Royal
Meteorological Society in 1898, gave his Presidential
Address on Weather Influences on Farm and Gar-
den Crops. He wrote: There are few sciences so in-
timately connected with each other as Meteorology,
Agriculture and Horticulture and went on to suggest
that Of all the influences brought to bear on vegetable
life by the atmosphere, that of temperature is the most
powerful and far-reaching (Mawley, 1898).
1.2. The nineteenth century
Twelve years later, another agriculturally-minded
President, Henry Mellish, spoke on a similar theme
(Mellish, 1910). Like Mawley, however, he made
no attempt to introduce quantitative relations be-
tween weather, productivity and management. The
emergence of agricultural meteorology as a science
was not far off, however. R.H. Hooker, President in
19211922, advocated the use of statistics to corre-
late yields with weather variables. He appreciated
that There is an enormous amount of work to be
done before we can determine the effect of a given
change in any one phenomenon at any given period
of the plants growth upon the ultimate yield of the
crop (Hooker, 1921). On a more positive note, he
observed that quite recently, a few writers on the
Continent of Europe. . . have made contributions to
the subject, and the general subject of agricultural
meteorology is there beginning to attract attention,
particularly in Italy. The quotation marks that appear
round agricultural meteorology in Hookers paper
are a reminder that this was a new term in the early
1920s, introduced to describe a field of research that
was essentially statistical.
In the period from 1920 to 1960, agricultural meteo-
rology and the closely-related subject of micrometeo-
rology took root and began to flourish after the Second
World War in several European countries, in North
America, in Australia and in China and Japan. One
important stimulus was the emergence of new instru-
mentation for measuring and recording the physical
environments of both crops and livestock and their re-
sponses to microclimatic factors. Initially, there were
few relevant text-books apart from Geigers Climate
Near the Ground (Geiger, 1927, in German), still a
good introduction to the subject but with a bias to-
wards forestry rather than agriculture. Rudolf Geiger
died in 1981, but a Fifth Edition containing new mate-
rial was published posthumously (Geiger et al., 1995).
Eventually, in 1968, Elsevier launched a new jour-
nal Agricultural Meteorology which flour-
ished and was expanded to Agricultural and Forest
Meteorology (hereafter AFM) in 1984. The titles of
papers published in this international journal through
the years reveal areas where the most significant work
has been done and how enthusiasm for specific top-
ics has waxed and waned over the years. Some early
papers were characteristic of the descriptive and sta-
tistical phases of agricultural meteorology; but over
the years a third mechanistic phase became dominant,
stimulated by the development of first-class instru-
mentation both for recording and for processing data.
2. Agricultural (and Forest) Meteorology
Table 1 contains data extracted (a) from the first
nine volumes of AFM, published from the launch of
the journal in December 1964 to June 1972; and (b)
from June 1966 to June 1998 periods chosen to
cover about 190 papers each. As an index of growth in
the subject over the past 34 years, the average rate of
publication increased from about 2 per month initially,
to 7.7 per month today. Appropriately, the first issue,
dated March 1964, begins with an article describing
the origins and contemporary work of WMO and its
Commission for Agricultural Meteorology in partic-
ular. The first of these, on International Agricultural
Meteorology, was written by Milton Blanc from Ari-
zona and L.P. Smith from the British Meteorological
Office, then President of the WMO Commission for
Agricultural Meteorology (Blanc and Smith, 1964).
The second, by O.M. Ashford, was on Technical As-
sistance in Agricultural Meteorology (Ashford, 1964).
The article was illustrated by a photograph captioned
A technician measuring radiation over a field in full
crop the present writer, assigned by WMO to the
Israel Meteorological Service with a remit to explore
how a long series of evaporation measurements could
best be analysed. This assignment led directly to devel-
opment of the so-called PenmanMonteith equation,
an example of how a practical problem can provide the
stimulus for a general solution with wide applications.
The titles of papers published in AFM through the
years reveal both the areas where most publishable
 J.L. Monteith / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 103 (2000) 59 7

Table 1
Distribution of papers in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology journal
Fields December 1964June 1972 (Vols. 19; 187a ) June 1996June 1998 (Vols. 8091; 185a )
No. % No. %
Climate 5 2.9 4 2.4
Microclimate
Field 35 20.2 27 16.4
Glasshouses 3 1.7 8 4.8
Animal houses 3 1.7 0 0
Storage of products 0 0 0 0
Crops
Growth 2 1.2 12 7.3
Yield 1 0.6 1 0.6
Development 1 0.6 4 2.4
Temperature 16 9.2 7 4.2
Radiation 12 6.9 14 8.4
CO2 exchange 2 1.2 10 6.1
Water balance 39 22.5 41 24.8
Pests and diseases 8 4.6 1 0.6
Other damage 3 1.7 0 0
Livestock
Climatic stress 1 0.6 0 0
Pest and diseases 4 2.3 0 0
Instrumentation 36 20.3 4 2.4
Modelling 2 1.2 32 19.4
a Total number of papers.

work has been done (though not necessarily the work
that has been of most immediate benefit to farmers
and foresters!); and the way priorities in research have
changed with time.
Major topics and trends can be summarized as
follows:
(a) The impact of weather on field crops constitutes
the bulk of papers in both periods (a) and (b), with a
very strong bias in favour of water balance and evapo-
ration in temperate climates (ca. 40%). Interest in the
agricultural implications of rising carbon dioxide con-
centrations has increased over the period covered but
is still not a major theme.
(b) Microclimatic studies in the field constitute al-
most 20% of all papers. A decrease in this fraction
with time has been balanced by an increase in papers
exploring the physics of glasshouse microclimates.
(c) In contrast to the literature on carbon dioxide,
AFM has published relatively few papers on the ways
in which global increases of temperature are likely (i)
to increase crop growth rates in many environments;
but (ii) to increase rates of development and thereby
to shorten the growing warn of determinate crops; and
(iii) to shorten the life cycles of pests and pathogens.
(d) A few papers on microclimatic aspects of animal
housing were published in early issues but none have
appeared recently. Likewise, the response of livestock
to climatic stress has received little attention.
(e) The microclimate of stored produce, a particu-
larly important issue in the tropics, is unrepresented
in both periods.
(f) Early interest in the development of instrumen-
tation appears to have been replaced by an enthusiasm
for modelling, which accounts for almost one fifth of
the papers in recent issues. This trend is an inevitable
consequence of the increasing availability of PCs and
of relevant software.
3. Other issues
A similar analysis of the Handbook of Agricul-
tural Meteorology, edited by Griffiths (1994), reveals a
greater emphasis on crop growth and yield and on the
8 J.L. Monteith / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 103 (2000) 59
relation between weather and stress in animals. Con-
versely there is much less emphasis on water balance.
However, the most significant difference between the
two sources is that Griffiths devoted about a third
of his review to the impact of weather and climate
on Decision Making, Management and Economics.
This important field is almost unrepresented in AFM,
which has a strong biophysical bias. The treatment in
Griffiths Handbook is therefore particularly welcome.
An older source of information is Agrometeorolog-
ical Methods, the proceedings of a UNESCO Sympo-
sium held in Reading, UK, in 1966. This provides an
overview of the state of the art 30 years ago, against
which one can measure progress or the lack of
it! in particular areas. It is salutary to read the
introduction by Austin Bourke (1968) on The aims
of agrometeorology. Having expressed some dissat-
isfaction with contemporary definitions of agricultural
meteorology, he framed his own in the following way.
The task of the agrometeorologist is to apply every
relevant meteorological skill to helping the farmer
to make the most efficient use of his physical en-
vironment, with the prime aim of improving agri-
cultural production, both in quantity and quality. . .
The agricultural meteorologist can be helpful only
in so far as he inspires the farmer to organize and
activate his own resources in order to benefit from
technical advice.
Looking through past volumes of AFM, it is diffi-
cult to believe that Austin Bourke would be happy to
find so much emphasis on experimentation and theory
and so little on helping farmers to be more productive
and more efficient. However, in contrast to the balance
of material in AFM, WMOs Selected list of WMO
publications of interest to agrometeorology reveals
an emphasis on the broad response to weather of spe-
cific crops and on the impact of pests and diseases
on both crops and livestock. These topics are clearly
appropriate for the agricultural arm of WMO because
of its concern with the many direct and indirect ways
in which weather affects agricultural production and
food supplies.
Two other international meetings, co-sponsored by
WMO, concentrated on tropical crops which received
little attention from meteorologists before the estab-
lishment of the International Agricultural Research
Centres. In 1982 and in Hyderabad, ICRISAT held an
International Symposium on The Agrometeorology of
Sorghum and Millet (Virmani and Sivakumar, 1984).
This was followed in 1985 by a similar meeting on
the Agrometeorology of Groundnut (Sivakumar and
Virmani, 1986).
Complementing these two publications, INRA and
others recently published Agrometeorology of Mul-
tiple Cropping in Warm Climates in which Baldy
and Stigter (1997) bring together a wealth of tropical
measurements in physically complex systems.
4. Models
In the 32 years since the UNESCO Symposium
at Reading, agricultural climatology has advanced on
several fronts, notably in the measurement of water
vapour and carbon dioxide fluxes and of polluting
gases; and in using PCs to build models that simulate
the response of crops or livestock to climate with the
ultimate objective of improving the effectiveness of
management.
The construction of contemporary crop models en-
tails the combination of many algorithms for physio-
logical processes and for the impact of environmental
factors on process rates. Commonly, the values of
model parameters are drawn from diverse sources but
this procedure has two weaknesses that are avoided
by the protocols of traditional science. First, infor-
mation from different sources is usually difficult to
be compatible but incompatibility is usually difficult
to detect and its impact on model output is hard to
quantify. Second, it is usually implicitly assumed
that input parameters are devoid of error so that pre-
dictions from models are impressively precise and
untainted by the uncertainties associated with mea-
surements! Field tests of models, preferably over a
range of climates, are therefore essential to establish
the validity of a model but relatively few rigorous
examples can be found in the literature. Two of these
have been chosen for contrasting success.
First, Hammer et al. (1995) obtained measurements
of peanut yields (Y) from 16 trials in Australia, one in
Indonesia and eight in the USA. Using local weather
and soil information, yields were correlated with esti-
mates (X) from PEANUTGRO, a model in the CERES
family, to give the regression
Y = (0.94 + 0.03)X + (47.1 + 1.73)(r 2 = 0.93)
 J.L. Monteith / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 103 (2000) 59
This is a highly satisfactory result justifying the
authors confidence that the model can be used to
identify new sites suitable for development by the
industry.
In contrast, Landau et al. (1998) attempted to cor-
relate yields of wheat reported from 341 field trials
in the UK with estimates from the Agricultural Re-
search Council wheat model (AFRC WHEAT2), from
CERES-Wheat and from SIRIUS, models developed
in the UK, the USA and New Zealand, respectively.
Weather was represented by maximum and minimum
air temperature, radiation and rainfall. The respective
correlation coefficients for the three models were 0.02,
0.00 and 0.04, but none of these figures were signifi-
cantly different from zero.
Given such conflicting evidence, how far can we
trust contemporary models, particularly those con-
cerned with crop yields? Wide variations have been
found in the yield predicted by different models for a
specific crop in a defined environment (e.g. Matthews
et al., 1995 for rice); or when the same crop model
is combined with predictions of future climate ob-
tained from different GCMs (e.g. Seino, 1995). On
the whole, models of water use appear more reliable
because they have a much simpler basis and have been
tested and improved for much longer. Hopefully, yield
models will eventually achieve comparable success.
5. Closing remarks
As we strive to maintain a sensible balance between
measurements and models, between instruments and
algorithms, we need to remember that food supplies
ultimately depend on the skill with which farmers can
exploit the potential of good weather and minimize the
impact of bad weather. I am sure this is what Austin
Bourke had in mind when he challenged participants
at the Reading meeting in the following terms.
The only valid test of an agrometeorological rule
or formula is this: does it give practical results?
. . . does the procedure, on average, lead to practical
help for the farmer? That this vital criterion should
not be lost sight of, I suggest that throughout the
coming week we should imagine that we are delib-
erating in the presence of a jury of intelligent prac-
tical farmers, with constant regard to their reaction
9
to our discussions and their probable verdict upon
our work. If we do this, we shall not stray too
far from the strictly utilitarian path. . . mapped out
for us.
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