Abstract
During the period spanning the 1970s and1980s, countries in the West African Sahel experienced severe drought. Its impact on agriculture and ecosystems has highlighted the importance of monitoring the Sahelian rainy season. In Sahelian countries such as Mali, rainfall is the major determinant of crop production. Unfortunately, rainfall is highly variable in time and space. Therefore, this study is conducted to analyze and forecast the impact of climatic parameters on the rain-fed rice yield cultivation in the Office Riz Mopti region. The data were collected from satellite imagery, archived meteorology data, yield and rice characteristics. The study employed Hanning filter to highlight interannual fluctuation, a test of Pettitt and the standardized precipitation index (SPI) to analyze the rainfall variability. Climate change scenarios under the RCP 8.5 scenario (HadGEM-2 ES) and agroclimatic (Cropwat) model are carried out to simulate the future climate and its impact on rice yields. The results of satellite image classifications of 1986 and 2016 show an increase of rice fields with a noticeable decrease of bare soil. The analysis of the SPI reveals that over the 30 years considered, 56.67% of the rainy seasons were dry (1986-2006) and 43.33% were wet (2007-2015). The modelling approach is applied over 1986-2006 and 2007-2015 periods—considered as typical dry and rainy years—and applied over the future, with forecasts of climate change scenarios in 2034. The results show a decrease in potential yield during dry and slightly wet years. The yields of rain-fed rice will be generally low between 2016 and 2027. Deficits are observed over the entire study area, in comparison with the potential yield. Thus, this situation could expose the population to food insecurity.
Highlights
The rainfall in Sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by strong variability [1]
Most of the classified pixels associated with water, rice fields and settlements classes have a high percentage of overall accuracy
One challenge in classifying land use and land cover in semi-arid region is the difficulty of accuracy in isolating the radiometric reflectance caused by vegetated cover from that caused by soil since the vegetation in such areas is typically sparse [30]
Summary
The rainfall in Sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by strong variability [1]. The drought recorded in the 1970s and 1980s has greatly affected the population as well as the economies and the ecosystems of the West Africa geographical area [2] [3] [4]. In the Sub-Saharan area, the regional distribution of crops follows the distribution of water, soils, and floodwater availability [7] This water is obtained directly from rainfall, but the source of water is climate-dependent. This study, aims to analyze the rainfall variability and its impacts on rain-fed rice production in Office Riz Mopti region for the ten years. The study of this variability and effect on the production will help for future planning to avert the effect of climatic change. This paper is aimed at analyzing the climate variability with a focus on field meteorological dataset between 1986-2016 periods and forecasting the impact of the climatic parameters on the yield of rain-fed rice production on Mopti region.
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