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Wheat is one of the most important crops in Hungary, which represents approximately 20% of the entire agricultural area of the country, and about 40% of cereals. A robust yield method has been improved for estimating and forecasting wheat yield in Hungary in the period of 2003-2015 using normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) derived from the data of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer. Estimation was made at the end of June -it is generally the beginning of harvest of winter wheat in Hungary -while the forecasts were performed 1-7 weeks earlier. General yield unified robust reference index (GYURRI) vegetation index was calculated each year using different curve-fitting methods to the NDVI time series. The correlation between GYURRI and country level yield data gave correlation coefficient (r) of 0.985 for the examined 13 years in the case of estimation. Simulating a quasi-operative yield estimation process, 10 years ' (2006-2015) yield data was estimated. The differences between the estimated and actual yield data provided by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office were less than 5%, the average difference was 2.5%. In the case of forecasting, these average differences calculated approximately 2 and 4 weeks before the beginning of harvest season were 4.5% and 6.8%, respectively. We also tested the yield estimation procedure for smaller areas, for the 19 counties (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics-3 level) of Hungary. We found that, the relationship between GYURRI and the county level yield data had r of 0.894 for the years 2003-2014, and by simulating the quasi-operative forecast for 2015, the resulting 19 county average yield values differed from the actual yield as much as 8.7% in average.

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Remote sensing-based crop yield estimation methods rely on vegetation indices, which depend on the availability of the number of observations during the year, influencing the value of the derived crop yield. In the present study, a robust yield estimation method was improved for estimating the yield of corn, winter wheat, sunflower, and rapeseed in Hungary for the period 2000–2020 using 16 vegetation indices. Then, meteorological data were used to reduce the differences between the estimated and census yield data. In the case of corn, the best result was obtained using the Green Atmospherically Resistant Vegetation Index, where the correlation between estimated and census data was R2 = 0.888 before and R2 = 0.968 after the meteorological correction. In the case of winter wheat, the Difference Vegetation Index produced the best result with R2 = 0.815 and 0.894 before and after the meteorological correction. For sunflower, these correlation values were 0.730 and 0.880, and for rapeseed, 0.765 and 0.922, respectively. Using the meteorological correction, the average percentage differences between estimated and census data decreased from 7.7% to 3.9%, from 6.7% to 3.9%, from 7.2% to 4.2%, and from 7.8% to 5.1% in the case of corn, winter wheat, sunflower, and rapeseed, respectively.