Abstract: The historic maize planting dataset in 70 stations was collected to analyze and validate the availability of CERES-Maize crop growth model together with the historic weather data in China from 1998 to 2000.These stations are located at North China spring maize area,Huanghuaihai plain summer maize area,South China mountain maize area,Southwest China maize area and Northwest China maize area.The data of growing period and yield were taken into account.Several statistic indexes,such as index of agreement(D) and root mean square error(RMSE),were applied to analyze and assess the model performance.The value of D is from 0.58 to 0.95 between the simulation and observation about growing period and the D of yield is from 0.66 to 0.88.These indicated that the simulations by CERES-Maize had an adequately agreement with observations.The errors between simulation and observation of growing period were lower than that of yield.The results also showed that statistic analysis at regional scale could be better to express the simulation results and assessments.

Key words: CERES-Maize model, CERES-Maize model, Maize planting region, Validation