Assessing the Agronomic Impact of Climate Variability and Change Using Regional Climate Models: A Matter of Scale

• Activity Number: 144
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Monday, July 30, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Brian Vincent Smoliak*+ and Alison Cullen and Stephen Po-Chedley
• Companies: University of Washington and University of Washington and University of Washington
• Keywords: Climate ; Climate impacts ; Linear regression ; Agriculture ; Crops ; Risk management

Abstract

Accurate estimates of climate impacts on crop productivity are necessary in order to secure global food security and pursue sustainable agriculture in the 21st century. We explore relationships between crop yield and climate variability using historical agronomic and climatological data; having estimated those relationships on the basis of observed data, we investigate the importance of scale in estimating climate impacts on agriculture in the future. Linear regression models provide estimates of present crop-climate relationships, and are combined with model projections of future change in temperature and precipitation in order to estimate future changes in yield. We focus on quantification of uncertainty in the agricultural impacts and the sensitivity of results to scale of the climate models used to produce the projections. Our results offer insights on the contributions to uncertainty in agricultural impacts from the estimated crop-climate relationship and the climate projections themselves. They also show where regional scale and global scale climate model projections compare favorably and diverge, with implications for risk management at the local to international scale.