Highland farming is agriculture that takes place 400 m above sea level and typically involves both low temperatures and long sunshine hours. Most highland Chinese cabbages are harvested in the Gangwon province. The Ubiquitous Sensor Network (USN) has been deployed to observe Chinese cabbages growth because of the lack of installed weather stations in the highlands. Five representative Chinese cabbage cultivation spots were selected for USN and meteorological data collection between 2015 and 2017. The purpose of this study is to develop a weight prediction model for Chinese cabbages using the meteorological and growth data that were collected one week prior. Both a regression and random forest model were considered for this study, with the regression assumptions being satisfied. The Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) was used to evaluate the predictive performance of the models. The variables influencing the weight of cabbage were the number of cabbage leaves, wind speed, precipitation and soil electrical conductivity in the regression model. In the random forest model, cabbage width, the number of cabbage leaves, soil temperature, precipitation, temperature, soil moisture at a depth of 30 cm, cabbage leaf width, soil electrical conductivity, humidity, and cabbage leaf length were screened. The RMSE of the random forest model was 265.478, a value that was relatively lower than that of the regression model (404.493); this is because the random forest model could explain nonlinearity.

Weather is the most influential factor for crop cultivation. Weather information for cultivated areas is necessary for growth and production forecasting of agricultural crops. However, there are limitations in the meteorological observations in cultivated areas because weather equipment is not installed. This study tested methods of predicting the daily mean temperature in onion fields using geostatistical models. Three models were considered: inverse distance weight method, generalized additive model, and Bayesian spatial linear model. Data were collected from the AWS (automatic weather system), ASOS (automated synoptic observing system), and an agricultural weather station between 2013 and 2016. To evaluate the prediction performance, data from AWS and ASOS were used as the modeling data, and data from the agricultural weather station were used as the validation data. It was found that the Bayesian spatial linear regression performed better than other models. Consequently, high-resolution maps of the daily mean temperature of Jeonnam were generated using all observed weather information.

Agricultural meteorological information is an important resource that affects farmersʼ income, food security, and agricultural conditions. Thus, such data are used in various fields that are responsible for planning, enforcing, and evaluating agricultural policies. The meteorological information obtained from automatic weather observation systems operated by rural development agencies contains missing values owing to temporary mechanical or communication deficiencies. It is known that missing values lead to reduction in the reliability and validity of the model. In this study, the hierarchical Bayesian spatio–temporal model suggests replacements for missing values because the meteorological information includes spatio–temporal correlation. The prior distribution is very important in the Bayesian approach. However, we found a problem where the spatial decay parameter was not converged through the trace plot. A suitable spatial decay parameter, estimated on the bias of root–mean–square error (RMSE), which was determined to be the difference between the predicted and observed values. The latitude, longitude, and altitude were considered as covariates. The estimated spatial decay parameters were 0.041 and 0.039, for the spatio-temporal model with latitude and longitude and for latitude, longitude, and altitude, respectively. The posterior distributions were stable after the spatial decay parameter was fixed. root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), and bias were calculated for model validation. Finally, the missing values were generated using the independent Gaussian process model.

Manufacturing and technology industries produce large amounts of air pollutants. Ulsan Metropolitan City, South Korea, is well-known for its large industrial complexes; in particular, the concentration of SO2 here is the highest in the country. We assessed SO2 monitoring sites based on conditional and joint entropy, because this is a common method for determining an optimal air monitoring network. Monthly SO2 concentrations from 12 air monitoring sites were collected, and the distribution of spatial locations was determined by kriging. Mean absolute error, Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), bias and correlation coefficients were employed to evaluate the considered algorithms. An optimal air monitoring network for Ulsan was suggested based on the improvement of RMSE.