Identifiability and assessment criteria for WOFOST crop calibration

Determine whether five calibration years of destructive sampling identify the seven WOFOST parameters used for maize calibration at Kellogg Biological Station and whether a fixed error ceiling is an appropriate assessment criterion for an interannual crop series.

Background

The WOFOST calibration reduced grain-mass error during calibration but performed worse than the default during validation, while biomass remained below the nominal error ceiling but still deteriorated relative to the baseline.

The authors explicitly leave unresolved both whether the available five calibration years can identify seven parameters and whether the fixed error ceiling is suitable for evaluating interannual crop observations.