Climate Change and the Need to Forecast Phenological Events in Agroclimate Risk Management

• Activity Number: 309
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Tuesday, August 5, 2014 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: SSC
• Author(s): James V. Zidek*+ and Song Cai and Nathaniel Newlands and Denise Neilsen
• Companies: University of British Columbia and University of British Columbia and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
• Keywords: phenology ; climate change ; time-to-event analysis ; bloom date ; survival analysis

Abstract

The near certainty of climate change has led to the recognition that its expected impacts, including diminishing food supplies and more generally agroclimate risk, needs to be managed. This includes the need to forecast the times of phenological events that are determined by cumulative temperature both within a given year for operations planning and for a future year's weather down-scaled from climate models. This talk will propose a general scenarios methodology for making such forecasts in both scenarios based on an adaptation of time-to-event analysis that contends with special features that present themselves in this context: events are progressive, i.e. irreversible, and they may not occur at all; the time to occurrence of any one event, becomes a predictor of the time to the next; the covariates are a non-Markovian, stochastic process; the goal is prediction, not hypothesis testing. The application will be to forecasting the bloom-- dates of perennial commercial crops in the Okanagan region of British Columbia