Frost Occurrence Risk Management for Pistachio Industry in Rafsanjan

This work develops a statistical model to assess the frost risk in Rafsanjan, one of the largest Pistachioproduction regions in the world. These models can be used to estimate the probability that: a frosthappens in a given time-period in the year; a frost happens after 10 warm days in the growing season etc.These probability estimates then can be used for: (1) assessing the agroclimate risk of investing in thisindustry; (2) pricing of weather derivatives. Autoregressive models with different seasonal componentsand lags are compared using AIC, BIC, AICc and cross validation criterions. The optimal model is AR(1)with 12 terms from Fourier series. The long-term trends are also accounted for and estimated from data.The optimal models are then used to simulate future weather from which the probabilities of appropriatehazard events for pistachio yield are estimated.