Abstract
A negative effect of increasing temperature on wheat production in the coming decades has been projected for Sudan, which is a major wheat producer in Sub-Saharan Africa. Wheat is susceptible to high temperature, so trend analysis of historical yields together with observed temperature is critical for understanding the effect of climate change. The objective of this study was to determine the association between yield of irrigated wheat in hot drylands of Sudan and temperature during the growing season (November–February). Regional-scale yield data in three major wheat-producing areas (Northern State, Gezira State, and Kassala State) in 48 crop seasons (1970/71–2017/18) were used to determine the correlation of yield with maximum (TMAX) and minimum temperatures (TMIN) at representative meteorological stations (Dongola, Wad Medani, and New Halfa, respectively). Frequencies of days with maximum temperature above 35 °C (THD) and minimum temperature above 20 °C (THN) were also used for correlation analysis. In all three areas, regression analysis detected upward trends in the growing-season temperature. The increase in temperature was particularly evident at Dongola, although no such trend has been reported previously. The yields were negatively correlated with the growing-season temperature, particularly THN in Northern State, TMAX in Gezira State, and TMIN in Kassala State. These results confirm that the recent increase in the growing-season temperature might have reduced the yield to some extent in the breadbasket of Sudan.
Highlights
Recent climate change has been reducing crop production in many parts of the world including Africa (IPCC 2014, 2019)
Temperature tends to increase over Sub-Saharan Africa (Gil-Alana et al 2019), and increasing trends in maximum and minimum temperatures are most likely associated with increasing trends in warm days and nights
Elagib (2010) has reported that the dry-season TMIN increased at a rate of 0.185 °C per decade at Wad Medani from the 1940s to the mid-2000s, but found no trend in the correlation of yield with maximum (TMAX), whereas we found no trend in TMIN but an increasing trend in TMAX (Fig. 4)
Summary
Recent climate change has been reducing crop production in many parts of the world including Africa (IPCC 2014, 2019). In countries vulnerable to climate change, temperature increases would impact field crop production (Hatfield et al 2011; Hatfield and Prueger 2015), that of wheat, a major cereal that is normally grown under cool climate. Case studies on wheat yield trends and temperature variations have been reported from various countries (You et al 2009; Brisson et al 2010; Licker et al 2013; Tack et al 2015; Asseng et al 2017; Morgounov et al 2018). An 11% yield decline in 1973–2010 was reported in Picardy (France), a vital winter wheat-producing region in Europe, where maximum spring temperatures increased by 2.4 °C and total fall precipitation decreased by 9% over the study
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