Increasing the prospective capacity of global crop and rangeland monitoring with phenology tailored seasonal precipitation forecasts

Abstract

Droughts are more and more often a limiting factor to agricultural production and can have severe negative effects on food security in vulnerable countries. Global agriculture early warning systems monitor agriculture in near real-time by analyzing meteorological data (e.g. precipitation and temperature) and optical remote sensing data as proxy vegetation health to detect possible negative anomalies and trigger warnings. Seasonal climate forecast can add a predictive component and inform about upcoming precipitation deficits, thus allowing anticipation and improved planning of response actions. Here, we propose a scheme to adapt the standard precipitation forecast from the seasonal Copernicus Climate Change Service multi-system to crop and rangeland phenology, making them suitable for agricultural early warning. Precipitation forecasts are first elaborated into tercile maps showing the probability of the most likely tercile (i.e. drier than normal, normal, wetter than normal) and associated skills of all possible monthly periods combinations included in the six months forecasting horizon. Afterwards, agronomically relevant tercile maps are produced for the closest season in time at any location. These maps are obtained by mosaicking the forecasts for the appropriate growing season period at each grid cell. The resulting map shows the tercile probability for the remaining part of the ongoing growing season (if any at time of analysis) or the probability of the next upcoming season (if in between growing season at time of analysis). The proposed methodology offers a precipitation seasonal forecast product ready to use by agricultural analysts and directly ingestible by automatic warning systems.