CROP YIELDING FORECAST SYSTEM.

The Agricultural and Regional Information Systems (ARIS) Unit of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre requires support for certain operational activities within the MARS project which monitors agriculture with remote sensing equipment. A prior information notice has been published on the Official Journal, with an invitation to tender expected to follow in the fourth quarter of 1999. The activities would be linked to its crop-yield forecasting system and will be divided into four separate lots. The first concerns the real-time daily provision of meteorological data covering the EU Member States, Central and Eastern European Countries (including the western border of Russia), the Maghreb, and Turkey, and quality checking of the data. The second requires the operating of a crop growth monitoring system (CGMS) including meteorological data interpolation and agro-meteorological indicator calculation and the mapping of results. The third lot involves management of a processing chain for low resolution satellite data. This covers NOAA-AVHRR (including data...