Identifying appropriate prediction models for estimating hourly temperature over diverse agro-ecological regions of India.

The present study tests the accuracy of four models in estimating the hourly air temperatures in different agroecological regions of the country during two major crop seasons, kharif and rabi, by taking daily maximum and minimum temperatures as input. These methods that are being used in different crop growth simulation models were selected from the literature. To adjust the biases of estimated hourly temperature, three bias correction methods (Linear regression, Linear scaling and Quantile mapping) were used. When compared with the observed data, the estimated hourly temperature, after bias correction, is reasonably close to the observed during both kharif and rabi seasons. The bias-corrected Soygro model exhibited its good performance at 14 locations, followed by the WAVE model and Temperature models at 8 and 6 locations, respectively during the kharif season. In the case of rabi season, the bias-corrected Temperature model appears to be accurate at more locations (21), followed by WAVE and Soygro models at 4 and 2 locations, respectively. The pooled data analysis showed the least error between estimated (uncorrected and bias-corrected) and observed hourly temperature from 04 to 08 h during kharif season while it was 03 to 08 h during the rabi season. The results of the present study indicated that Soygro and Temperature models estimated hourly temperature with better accuracy at a majority of the locations situated in the agroecological regions representing different climates and soil types. Though the WAVE model worked well at some of the locations, estimation by the PL model was not up to the mark in both kharif and rabi seasons. Hence, Soygro and Temperature models can be used to estimate hourly temperature data during both kharif and rabi seasons, after the bias correction by the Linear Regression method. We believe that the application of the study would facilitate the usage of hourly temperature data instead of daily data which in turn improves the precision in predicting phenological events and bud dormancy breaks, chilling hour requirement etc.

Vitamin A improves insulin sensitivity by increasing insulin receptor phosphorylation through protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B regulation at early age in obese rats of WNIN/Ob strain.

To test the hypothesis that early intervention of vitamin A-enriched diet contains the development of obesity and improves insulin resistance, 50-day-old male lean and obese rats of WNIN/Ob strain were given either stock diet (2.6 mg vitamin A/kg diet) or vitamin A-enriched diet (129 mg vitamin A/kg diet) for 3 months. Compared with stock diet-fed obese rats, vitamin A-enriched diet-fed obese rats had reduced body weight gain, visceral adiposity and improved insulin sensitivity as evidenced by decreased fasting plasma insulin and unaltered glucose levels, which could possibly be due to higher phosphorylation of soleus muscle insulin receptor. This in turn is explained by decreased protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B) levels. Most of these changes were not observed in lean rats. In conclusion, chronic feeding of vitamin A-enriched diet to obese rats at an early age ameliorates visceral adiposity and improves the insulin sensitivity, possibly by decreasing soleus muscle PTP1B levels.