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Assessing relevant climate data for agricultural applications

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Title Assessing relevant climate data for agricultural applications
 
Creator Ramírez Villegas, Julián
Challinor, Andrew J.
 
Subject agriculture
climate
models
forestry
 
Description Climate change is expected to substantially reduce agricultural yields, as reported in the by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In Sub-Saharan Africa and (to a lesser extent) in South Asia, limited data availability and institutional networking constrain agricultural research and development. Here we performed a review of relevant aspects in relation to coupling agriculture–climate predictions, and a three-step analysis of the importance of climate data for agricultural impact assessment. First, using meta-data from the scientific literature we examined trends in the use of climate and weather data in agricultural research, and we found that despite agricultural researchers’ preference for field-scale weather data (50.4% of cases in the assembled literature), large-scale datasets coupled with weather generators can be useful in the agricultural context. Using well-known interpolation techniques, we then assessed the sensitivities of the weather station network to the lack of data and found high sensitivities to data loss only over mountainous areas in Nepal and Ethiopia (random removal of data impacted precipitation estimates by ±1300 mm/year and temperature estimates by ±3 °C). Finally, we numerically compared IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) climate models’ representation of mean climates and interannual variability with different observational datasets. Climate models were found inadequate for field-scale agricultural studies in West Africa and South Asia, as their ability to represent mean climates and climate variability was limited: more than 50% of the country-model combinations showed
 
Date 2012-08
2013-01-31T11:12:52Z
2013-01-31T11:12:52Z
 
Type Journal Article
 
Identifier Ramirez-Villegas J, Challinor A J. 2012. Assessing relevant climate data for agricultural applications. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 161: 26–45.
0168-1923
https://hdl.handle.net/10568/25143
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agrformet.2012.03.015
 
Language en
 
Rights Copyrighted; all rights reserved
Limited Access
 
Format p. 26-45
 
Publisher Elsevier BV
 
Source Agricultural and Forest Meteorology