Simulated county- and state-level maize yields, 1979-2012

This dataset contains simulations - performed as part of the project "Predicting agricultural impacts of large-scale drought:2012 and the case for better modeling" -- for county and state-level maize yields and production totals in the conterminous US for the year 2012 as well as hindcasts for maize yields and production totals from 1979-2011 for use in validation and analysis. The zero lead time forecasts for 2012 are estimated from simulations of pDSSAT, a gridded high-resolution version of the detailed biophysical crop growth model CERES-Maize (as part of DSSAT). The simulations were conducted in December 2012 and published to figshare in January 2013 in anticipation of the release of the official statistics on county-level US maize yields from USDA NASS in February 2013. Paper detailing this work is Joshua Elliott, Michael Glotter, Neil Best, Ken Boote, Jim Jones, Jerry Hatfield, Cynthia Rosenzweig, Leonard A. Smith, and Ian Foster, (2013). Predicting agricultural impacts of large-scale drought: 2012 and the case for better modeling. Mathematics and Computer Science Division Preprint ANL/MCS-P4034-0213 Argonne National Laboratory, 2013. RDCEP Working Paper No. 13-01. Available at http://www.rdcep.org/predicting-agricultural-impacts-large-scale-drought-2012-and-case-better-modeling and http://www.agmip.org/blog/2013/02/21/predicting-agricultural-impacts-of-large-scale-drought/