On analyzing the degree of coldness in Iowa, a North Central Region, United States: An XML exploitation in spatial databases

Abstract

State of Iowa is an agricultural rich state in north central region and is divided into 99 counties. NCRA in the United States maintains agricultural databases to facilitate crop and risk analysis, pest management and forecasting. NC94 is one such dataset which is intensively used and is available for public use through many sources to process and analyze to get future predictions about agriculture. In this work we calculate the cumulative degree of coldness in Iowa with spatial granularity as county in last 30 years. To demonstrate the degree of coldness, we choose blue as the base color and counties are rendered with different shades of blue color based on the degree of coldness. Higher intensity of the color reflects the higher coldness whereas the lower intensity corresponds to lower coldness. We expect that the results of this research provide direct benefits to farmers and will attract the attention of agricultural/ computational scientific community. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.