Climate Team Highlights March 1, 2011 February 29, 2012 Climate Team Leader: Alex Ruane

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1 Climate Team Highlights March 1, 2011 February 29, 2012 Climate Team Leader: Alex Ruane Global Workshops and Climate Team Protocols: The Climate Team continued to develop protocols for climate data analysis and scenario generation building upon the work begun at the Kickoff Workshop in At the 2011 Global Workshop in San Antonio the Climate Team focused on the role of sensitivity tests and impacts response surfaces, the need for a large ensemble of climate scenarios in order to quantify uncertainty, the generation of an AgMIP Atlas of agroclimatic data and indices across models and datasets, and potentially important interactions between crop models and weather generators. As AgMIP depends on the Team for many aspects of Climate, what was known as the Climate Scenarios Team is now simply the Climate Team. Establishment of AgMIP climate data format and climate toolbox: To facilitate the broad use of AgMIP climate datasets the Climate Team developed a standard data format (with a.agmip extension). This standard format enables the development of data tools and converters that will help interactions between models and research groups around the world. The Climate Team has already developed data processing and analysis routines to evaluate and create (from various observational and model output datasets) these files, and has distributed.agmip files to dozens of research groups around the world through AgMIP projects. Support of Crop Model Intercomparison Pilots: The AgMIP Team conducted several activities to support the AgMIP Wheat, Maize, Rice, and Sugarcane Model Intercomparison Pilots. For each Pilot the Climate Team helped identify four sentinel sites for model simulations, collected, quality-controlled, and re-formatted historical climate data, and generated scenarios for sensitivity tests and future climate impacts. The Climate Team is also helping to analyze Pilot results and intercompare crop model sensitivities to climate stresses. Climate Team activities at the South American AgMIP Workshop: The Climate Team led breakout sessions, conducted workshop exercises, and provided a large amount of data for AgMIP activities at the AgMIP South American Workshop in Campinas, Brazil. Climate data were collected and converted to the standard AgMIP format for sites in five South American countries, including sites that were the subject of rice, maize, and sugarcane intercomparisons at the workshop. The Climate Team also led a capacity-building breakout session introducing major AgMIP concepts, methodologies, and tools to participants from South America and Sub-Saharan Africa in order to facilitate future regional assessments and model intercomparisons. The Team supported the development of Representative Agricultural

2 Pathways in a manner consistent with the IPCC framework, and built relationships with national meteorological agencies in the region who are seeking a suitable framework to provide climate data for AgMIP activities. As an example of Climate Team activities and Workshop results, Figure 1 shows an uncertainty exercise characterizing the changing climate characteristics projected for a major agricultural region in Brazil, finding large uncertainty in seasonal rainfall and a consistent warming signal in climate model projections. Figure 1: Growing season rainfall and mean temperature for Piracicaba for the 30 baseline years, as well as the 30 years from each of 16 GCM scenarios for the A2 Near-Term, Mid-Term, and End-of-Century periods. Climate Team activities at the Sub-Saharan Africa AgMIP Workshop: The Climate Team repeated many of these workshop activities at the Sub-Saharan Africa AgMIP Workshop in Kenya. Weather station data from thirteen countries were quality-controlled and converted to AgMIP format for workshop activities and other extensions. The Climate Team Breakouts included participants from nine African nations, including numerous heads of meteorological services. Team activities also progressed beyond what was accomplished in South America, including developing a methodology for climate zoning, drafting a potential data-sharing policy, and casting climate scenarios from a particular point across a wider region (for a pilot study in the Machakos district of Kenya). The Climate Team also worked with the Crop Modeling Team to design and evaluate agroclimate metrics using crop model simulation outputs, identifying a sensitivity to precipitation in Ghana that is dependent on the management of nitrogen fertilizers (Figure 2).

3 Interac'ng Sensi'vity to Precipita'on and Fer'lizer Amounts 120 Kg N 60 Kg N 0 Kg N Correla'on (r) between Maize Yield and Precipita'on Figure 2: Correlations between maize yield and growing season precipitation from at Wa, Ghana, by farming system according to the CERES-Maize simulations. Climate Team activities at the AgMIP South Asia Regional Workshop: Progress continued at the South Asia Regional Workshop, where meteorological data for stations in all five South Asian countries were quality-controlled and converted to the AgMIP format. Stations and scenarios were prepared for specific crop model applications for rice, wheat, and peanut modeling, and prior climate impact results for Banlgadeshi agriculture were provided for an Economic Modeling Team exercise. Work also began on an AgMIP atlas which will illustrate future climate stresses for future AgMIP research activities (e.g., Figure 3). The Climate Team also worked with the Crop Modeling Team to conduct sensitivity tests for temperature and CO2 in order to construct impacts response surfaces showing the coupled sensitivities to these two key climate variables and the uncertainty of future climate projections (Figure 4). In addition to the capacity building of the Breakouts, the Climate Team also intercompared algorithms for solar radiation and evapotranspiration estimation, finding that the AgMIP data filling provided value in water resources management. The South Asia Workshop also spurred the development of monsoon change scenarios whereby the onset, retreat, and seasonal totals of monsoon rainfalls could be adjusted in order to understand how projected changes in this critical circulation might affect agricultural production. As the monsoon climatology varies across the Sub-Continent, work also began to classify different precipitation regimes by geographic region.

4 Figure 3: Projected climate change over South Asia (Mid-Century compared to baseline). Top left: Median temperature changes (ºC); bottom left: standard deviation of temperature changes across 16 GCMs (ºC); top right: Median precipitation changes (%); bottom right: reliability of rainfall projections represented as the number of models projecting wetter conditions minus the number of models projecting drier conditions at each point.

5 Figure 4: Wheat responses to Temperature and CO 2 at Delhi, India, from three crop models. The colored dots represent the mean of 30-year simulations for each sensitivity test, while the contours represent an impacts response surface regressed to these results. Shapes represent projections of future temperature and CO 2 concentrations from GCM simulations of the A2 (red symbols) and B1 (black symbols) scenarios over the 21 st century. Gridded climate scenarios and the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP): The AgMIP Climate Team has also played an integral role in collaborating with the Inter- Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP; to undertake consistent climate impact studies for agriculture and other sectors. AgMIP Climate Team members helped to plan climate scenario selection and methodologies and have also been instrumental in quality control as these data are released. AgMIP will lead the agricultural components of ISI-MIP. Data acquisition: The Climate Team has also spent a considerable amount of effort in identifying and downloading climate datasets for AgMIP activities. These include observational products, retrospective analyses, and climate model outputs from the just-released CMIP5 experiments that will inform the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Pilot Climate Studies: The Climate Team is also involved in several ongoing pilot studies utilizing AgMIP scenarios in South Africa, Brazil, and Central America.