Forgot your password?
Working Group 3
Developing and Assessing Future Regional and Local Scenarios of Agroclimatic Conditions.
Climate modelling continues to be a rapidly growing field of science. Although useful attempts with simple climate models were made with early computers, it is only during the last two decades or so that computers have been powerful enough for coupled atmosphere-ocean models to be employed for climate prediction. Their results have been sufficiently
comprehensive and credible to be taken seriously by policy makers. Climate models that have been developed are probably the most elaborate and sophisticated of computer software developed in any area of natural science. As the power of computers increases it becomes possible to investigate the sensitivity of models by running a variety of ensembles that include different initial conditions, model parameterisation and formulations.
Climate projections are now available based on several variables, such as emission/concentration/radiative forcing, which themselves depend on assumptions concerning, for example, future socio-economic and technological developments, population number, deforestation, land use, etc. On this basis several climate scenarios have been proposed, representing a plausible and often simplified representation of the future climate, based on an internally consistent set of climatological relationships that have been constructed for explicit use in investigating the potential consequences of anthropogenic climate change, often serving as input to impact models.
WG3 activity will be developed on this outline, collecting the future scenarios over European regions according to WG1 and WG4 output. The analysis will be centred on the available scenarios, also depending on their spatial and temporal resolution. Agroclimatic indices and simulation models will then be applied to available data, in order to obtain a description of future change (frequency, intensity, trend) in climatic and hazard impacts on agricultural activities (crop protection, watering, site selection, etc.). The forecasts will be limited to the next few decades, with the aim of increasing the reliability of the simulations.
Deliverables
Key deliverables of WG3 will be:
- collection of future climate scenarios for various European regions according to agroclimatic index and simulation model characteristics;
- assessment of future trends of climatic conditions and hazards;
- evaluation of climate scenario reliability according to the current situation.
