The World Climate Research Programme Grand Challenge on Water for the Food Baskets in the World

The Water for the Food Baskets Grand Challenge is a GEWEX (Global Energy and Water EXchanges Project) led activity as part of the World Climate Research Programme. Within this grand challenge we address how to effectively incorporate aspects of the human dimension, e.g. irrigation and water management, crop rotation etc. in climate and weather modeling as well as how to link the latter to crop and vegetation modeling at regional and global scales. The human related aspects are not just geophysically driven but more by socio-economical factors and hence require different expertise and within this grand challenge we seek to integrate the various knowledge communities to address these issues. An important aspect of modeling food and crop production is a realistic representation of the climate and weather at the appropriate scales. Hence, convection-permitting modeling provides a new and clear prospect in improving our global and regional climate forecasts.This presentation gives an overview of the various aspects and rationale behind this grand challenge as well as offers an explanation on the implementation of this activity. A recently started project called LIAISE will be used to showcase some examples of experimental set up.