Climate scenario generation for the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP)

The Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP) is a distributed climate-scenario simulation exercise for historical model intercomparison and future climate change conditions with participation of multiple crop and agricultural trade modeling groups around the world. The goals of AgMIP are to improve substantially the characterization of risk of hunger and world food security due to climate change and to enhance adaptation capacity in both developing and developed countries. AgMIP will place regional changes in agricultural production in a global context that reflects new trading opportunities, imbalances, and shortages in world markets resulting from climate change and other driving forces for food supply. Historical period results will spur model improvement and interaction among major modeling groups, while future period results will lead directly to tests of adaptation and mitigation strategies across a range of scales. AgMIP will act as a demonstration of a multi-scale and transdisciplinary impact assessment utilizing the latest methods for climate and agricultural scenario generation.

This presentation overviews the work of AgMIP's Climate Scenario Team, led by Dr. Ruane, which will collect historical observations and generate consistent future climate scenarios for distributed agricultural impact experiments around the world. Future scenarios will be designed to explore the impacts of changes in mean climate as well as the effects of changing climate variability on yield reliability. These scenarios must account for various forms of uncertainty in climate projections, and must be practical for regions with both high and low data density. AgMIP climate scenario groups will allow various climate changes to be examined through the lens of agricultural and economic impacts, which will help identify and prioritize research directions in the climate and impacts communities.