Abstract: Heat condition is one of the most crucial factors that affect the growth and development of crops, which is also of great importance for Northeast China located in the middle and high latitudes. Accumulated temperature is the main factor affecting yield formation, and similarly, temperature plays a key role in determining the duration of growing seasons, yield and so on. Effects of temperature on growth and development of crops are investigated extensively and various kinds of accumulated temperature indexes are established. However, these accumulated temperature models are not always stable. Therefore, it is important to improve the indexes or models, making them convenient to calculate with great stability and applicable to different regions, environments and varieties. A relatively stable accumulated temperature model (NLM) proposed by Shen Guoquan is studied which is applicable to spring maize in northeast China. There are numerous maize varieties and significant differences in parameters determined by different varieties when applying NLM. Therefore, it is important to establish a general accumulated temperature model considering varietal attribute to improve the applicability. Four varieties with more observable years and stations are selected, which are Dongnong 248, Longdan 13, Sidan 19 and Danyu 13. The NLM is adopted based on observations of the growth and development of spring maize and meteorological data in-situ in Northeast China. Biological significance of parameters and the relationship between parameters and varieties or mature period are analyzed, and thus NLM is improved effectively and verified.Results show that, there are no invalid parameters in fitting equations of four maize varieties. The parameter P is determined as 0.5 based on the smallest variation coefficient of accumulated temperature. There is a significant correlation between parameter K and parameter Q, indicating that the parameter K may be only a statistical parameter with no clear biological significance. There is a significant difference of accumulated temperature among varieties. The relationship between the parameter Q and the mean value of effective accumulated temperature or active accumulated temperature during the whole growth period is found to be of good correlation, which indicates that Q is related to the mature period types of different maize varieties. Therefore, a general model applicable to different varieties is proposed whose parameters Q and K are represented by effective accumulated temperature or active accumulated temperature. The application capacity of the model has been significantly improved.