On the effect of sunshine on wheat yield at Rothamsted

Abstract

The method used in this paper to reduce sunshine data is that developed by Fisher(1). It consists, briefly, in fitting to the distribution for each year, a curvewhere T0, T1T2, etc., are orthogonal polynomial functions of zero, first, second, etc., order in time. The constants s0, s1, s2, … etc., are found by least squares, and are correlated with similar rainfall constants (r0, r1, r2 etc.) and with the crop.The regression of the wheat yield on rainfall has already been found (1), so a method has been devised, whereby those results can be used in order to find the partial regression of wheat yield on the sunshine sequence, eliminating all rainfall effect.