Abstract
Abstract. Climate oscillations are periodically fluctuating oceanic and atmospheric phenomena, which are related to variations in weather patterns and crop yields worldwide. In terms of crop production, the most widespread impacts have been observed for the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which has been found to impact crop yields on all continents that produce crops, while two other climate oscillations – the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) – have been shown to especially impact crop production in Australia and Europe, respectively. In this study, we analyse the impacts of ENSO, IOD, and NAO on the growing conditions of maize, rice, soybean, and wheat at the global scale by utilising crop yield data from an ensemble of global gridded crop models simulated for a range of crop management scenarios. Our results show that, while accounting for their potential co-variation, climate oscillations are correlated with simulated crop yield variability to a wide extent (half of all maize and wheat harvested areas for ENSO) and in several important crop-producing areas, e.g. in North America (ENSO, wheat), Australia (IOD and ENSO, wheat), and northern South America (ENSO, soybean). Further, our analyses show that higher sensitivity to these oscillations can be observed for rainfed and fully fertilised scenarios, while the sensitivity tends to be lower if crops were to be fully irrigated. Since the development of ENSO, IOD, and NAO can potentially be forecasted well in advance, a better understanding about the relationship between crop production and these climate oscillations can improve the resilience of the global food system to climate-related shocks.
Highlights
By using the historical crop yield output derived from a multi-model ensemble of global gridded crop model intercomparison (GGCMI), we aim to analyse the impacts of El Niño– Southern Oscillation (ENSO), North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) on maize, rice, soybean, and wheat yields at the global scale
The oscillations studied here, ENSO shows the widest impacts on yields of maize, wheat (49 %), and rice (48 %), while IOD and ENSO both show a similar extent of impacts on the yields of soy (53 % and 50 %, respectively) (Table 3)
In Australia, there is significant potential to utilise the information for IOD along with ENSO to understand crop yield fluctuations, as they can explain a large proportion of local crop yield variability (Fig. S13; Yuan and Yamagata, 2015)
Summary
Climate oscillations are periodically fluctuating oceanic and atmospheric phenomena, and they have been shown to impact hydroclimatological conditions (Dai et al, 1998; Hurrell et al, 2003; Saji and Yamagata, 2003; Trenberth, 1997; Ummenhofer et al, 2009; Ward et al, 2014) and crop productivity (Anderson et al, 2017; Ceglar et al, 2017; Heino et al, 2018; Iizumi et al, 2014; Yuan and Yamagata, 2015) worldwide. The most notorious climate oscillation, the El Niño– Southern Oscillation (ENSO), is the most significant driver of global climate variability (Trenberth, 1997), while two other prominent and widely studied climate oscillations, the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) (Saji et al, 1999) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) (Hurrell, 1995), are known to affect temperature and precipitation patterns around the globe (Hurrell et al, 2003; Saji and Yamagata, 2003) All three of these climate oscillations have been shown to significantly impact crop productivity in global (Heino et al, 2018; Iizumi et al, 2014) and regional studies (Anderson et al, 2017; Ceglar et al, 2017; Yuan and Yamagata, 2015). The largest fingerprint of these three oscillations is that of ENSO, which has been found to influence crop productivity on all continents that produce crops (Anderson et al, 2019; Iizumi et al, 2014)
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