Influence of weather parameters on rice false smut disease progression in Tamil Nadu, India

False smut of rice is an upcoming menace to rice production in India. In order to understand the intricate relationship between disease incidence and weather parameters, field experiments were conducted for three years (2019, 2020 and 2021) in two cropping seasons viz., late kharif (August to November) and rabi (October to January) at the Agricultural College and Research Institute (AC & RI), Madurai, Tamil Nadu. Results revealed that the disease severity had positive correlation with relative humidity (RH), wind speed (WS) and bright sunshine hours (BSS) and negative correlation with heavy rainfall (RF), evaporation (EP) and temperature. The pooled data analysis (2019 and 2020) for the late kharif and rabi cropping season revealed that disease severity was perfectly showed positive correlation with relative humidity (0.80) and wind speed (0.83) and negatively correlated with weekly maximum temperature (-0.78) and minimum temperature (-0.84). The step wise linear regression analysis was performed which revealed that among the six weather factors minimum temperature influenced the false smut disease severity up to 92%.