<![CDATA[Crop Water Stress Index (CWSI), derived from vegetation features (NDVI) and canopy thermal temperature (LST), is an effective method to evaluate sugarcane sensitivity to drought using satellite data. However, obtaining CWSI values is complicated. This study introduces a novel approach to estimate CWSI using climatological data, including average air temperature, humidity, rainfall, sunshine duration, and wind speed features obtained from the local weather station BMKG Malang City, East Java, for the period 2021-2023. Before estimating CWSI, we analyzed sugarcane water stress phenology, examined the strength of the correlation between climatological features and CWSI, and looked at the potential for adding lag features. Our proposed prediction model uses climatological features with additional Lag features in a machine learning regression approach and 5-fold cross-validation of the training-testing data split with the help of optimization using hyperparameters. Different machine learning regression models are implemented and compared. The evaluation results showed that the prediction performance of the SVR model achieved the best accuracy with R2 = 90.45% and MAPE = 9.55%, which outperformed other models. These findings indicate that climatological features with lag effects can effectively predict water stress conditions in rainfed sugarcane if using an appropriate prediction model. The main contribution of this study is the utilization of local climatological data, which is easier to obtain and collect than sophisticated satellite data, to estimate CWSI. The application of the results shows that climatological data with lag effects can accurately estimate water stress conditions in rainfed sugarcane. In drought-prone areas, this strategy can help sugarcane farmers make better choices about land management and irrigation.]]>
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