A team of Iowa State University Department of Agronomy faculty and staff specialists in crops, soils and climate have begun an innovative pilot project to provide an in-season crop and soil water-nitrogen status and an end-of-season yield forecast. The approach combines use of the Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator (APSIM) cropping systems model, the Weather Research and Forecast Model (WRF), and parallel in-field data collection to verify model predictions.