Chaotic attractors captured from remote sensing time series for the dynamics of cereal crops

A chaotic attractor was obtained from remote sensing data, for the first time, in the early 2010s, its Poincare section revealing a weakly dissipative dynamics. This attractor was captured from a time series of vegetation index, for the cycles of cereal crops in semi-arid region. This attractor was fully unexpected, since it was also the first attractor of a weakly dissipative dynamics directly extracted from observational time series. The generality of this result is questioned here by applying the same modelling approach - the global modelling technique - to four provinces in coastal and inland Morocco: Safi, El Jadida, Khourigba and Khenifra. Several experimentations are considered, applying the analyses at the provinces scale, or to several provinces in association and in aggregation. The obtained models confirm the results obtained in the early 2010s: the dynamics of cereal crops is chaotic and can be approximated by a weakly dissipative three-dimensional dynamics.