Adverse weather conditions in critical periods of vegetative plant growth affect crop productivity, being a fundamental parameter for yield forecast. An increase in weather forecasting accuracy may be obtained by applying statistical correction to remove model bias. This study used statistical correction of ensemble forecasting with the atmospheric general circulation model (Center for Weather Forecasting and Climate Studies/Center for Ocean - Land - Atmosphere Studies - CPTEC/COLA) by mean error removal for three cities in the South of Brazil. Comparisons were made between corrected and original precipitation forecasts, and between these and data observed at their respective meteorological stations. Results showed that the applied statistical correction method may improve forecasting performance in some situations and that the term of forecast present high accuracy, indicating the importance of ensemble forecasting as an auxiliary tool in agricultural crop monitoring.
agricultural monitoring; accuracy of meteorological models; weather forecast; plant growth
