Cropping index is a very important indicator. Food production potential in the future can be forecasted by the cropping index potential. However

there were little studies on the cropping index potential. Several references estimated the cropping index potential over China by the very simple means or with the provincial statistical data. The results were different. This paper put forward the methods of calculating cropping index potential based on GIS technology. The agricultural statistical data were processed. The statistical data of the area of arable land of each county were replaced by the data of the area of arable land extracted from remotely sensed data due to the quality of the statistical data. The maximum of cropping index of each county then was calculated further. The climatic data were collected and processed

too. After analyzing the relationship between the maximum of cropping index and the accumulated temperature

precipitation and sun hour data

this paper put forward the model of cropping index potential by the means of the outside envelope. Then this paper calculated the cropping index potential over China with 1 km resolution based on the model the paper proposed. The cropping index potential of the whole China and each province were obtained by using the spatial statistical methods. According to the results

the cropping index potential of the whole China is 198.5%.