Servicio climático de predicción estacional de cosechas

Abstract

Seasonal forecasts is awakening growing interest in different sectors. Particularly, rain-fed crops are completely dependent on precipitation and temperature. We present here the works done at AEMET during MEDSCOPE project. We downscale temperature and precipitation information from ECMWF-SEAS5 March run, and couple it to aquacrop, comparing it to an ensemble based on past observed climatologies, producing in both cases probabilistic crop yield forecasts for winter barley and wheat in Castille and Leon. A synthetic observational dataset is generated coupling aquacrop with reanalysis, to provide an atmospheric conditions dependant baseline for direct results evaluation. Results show potential for anticipating unfavourable conditions for the harvest.