Analysis of similar weather conditions to improve reuse in weather-based decision support systems

Abstract Weather-based decision support systems (DSSs) are being built to improve the efficiency of the production systems in the domains of healthcare, agriculture, transport, governance and so on. Normally, a weather condition (WC) is represented by the statistical values of weather variables for a given duration (e.g. a day or a week). In a weather-based DSS, given a WC, the domain experts prepare the appropriate suggestions to improve the efficiency of the stakeholders. Normally, once the domain experts prepare a suggestion for a given WC that belongs to certain period (e.g. year or season), there is a scope to reuse the same suggestion for the similar WCs of other period(s). As a result, the performance of the DSS could be improved. In this paper, to improve reuse, we have proposed a notion of category-based WC (CWC) which is formed by using the categories of weather variables in the respective domain. By considering the context of agromet advisory service operated by India Meteorological Department (IMD) and the corresponding weather categories provided by IMD, we have analyzed the extent of reuse among CWCs by conducting the experiments on 30 years of weather data collected at Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, Telangana state. The experiments are conducted by considering two types of CWCs with the duration equal to one day and five days. By varying the number of weather variables in CWC from one to five, we have computed the extent of reuse among CWCs of different periods of the following period types: year, season, and phenophases (i.e., growth stages) of the Rice crop. The results show that there is a significant similarity among the CWCs of the given period and the CWCs of the preceding periods of each period type. For any domain including agriculture, the results provide an opportunity to improve the efficiency of weather-based agricultural DSSs by improving the reuse of the weather-based suggestions.