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Seasonal Weather Forecasting in the Finger Lakes Region

Authors

  • Marla Litsky
  • Emily Xu
  • Sarah Lee
  • Chloe Zhang

Mentor

Professor Cantay Caliskan

Sponsor

Benchmark Labs, Thomas Varner and Ulrik Soderstrom

Abstract

With the recent fluctuations in weather, it has been increasingly difficult to prepare for anomalous weather events as a farmer or landowner. Due to our proximity to the Finger Lakes, our concern lies with the vineyards in the Finger Lakes region. An unexpected warm April in 2023 caused grapevines to bud earlier than usual and made them susceptible to frost damage. A sudden drop in temperature during My left grapevines in freezing temperatures for 4-6 hours overnight, leading to a catastrophic loss in crops for some vineyards. Some estimated loss of half the harvest. In order to help vineyards with frost prediction, we built a Hidden Markov Model matching algorithm that computes log-likelihood scores between seasons. We implemented seasonal grouping in this approach.

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