Abstract: While crop models are widely used to assess the change in crop productivity with climate change, their skill in assessing irrigation water demand or the risk of crop failure in large area impact assessments is relatively unknown. The objective of this study is to investigate which aspects of modeling crop water use (reference crop evapotranspiration (ET0), soil water extraction, soil evaporation, soil water balance and root growth) contributes most to the variability in estimates of maize crop water use and the risk of crop failure, and demonstrate the resulting uncertainty in a climate change impact study for Europe. The SIMPLACE crop modeling framework was used to couple the LINTUL5 crop model in factorial combinations of 2-3 different approaches for simulating the 5 aspects of crop water use, resulting in 51 modeling approaches. Using experiments in France and New Zeland, analysis of total sensitivity revealed that ET0 explained the most variability in both irrigated maize water use and rainfed grain yield levels, with soil evaporation also imporatant in the French experiment. In the European impact study, net irrigation requirement differed by 36% between the Penman and Hargreaves ET0 methods in the baseline period. Average EU grain yields were similar between models, but differences approached 1-2 tonnes in parts of France and Southern Europe. EU wide esimates of crop failure in the historical period ranged between 5.4 years for Priestley-Taylor to every 7.9 years for the Penman ET0 methods. While the uncertainty in absolute values between models was significant, estimates of relative changes were similar between models, confirming the utility of crop models in assessing climate change impacts. If ET0 estimates in crop models can be improved, through the use of appropriate methods, uncertainty in irrigation water demand as well as in yield estimates under drought can be reduced.

Abstract: We used simple and explicit methods, as well as improved datasets for climate, crop phenology and yields, to address the association between variability in crop yields and climate anomalies in China from 1980 to 2008. We identified the most favourable and unfavourable climate conditions and the optimum temperatures for crop productivity in different regions of China. We found that the simultaneous occurrence of high temperatures, low precipitation and high solar radiation was unfavourable for wheat, maize and soybean productivity in large portions of northern, northwestern and northeastern China; this was because of droughts induced by warming or an increase in solar radiation. These climate anomalies could cause yield losses of up to 50 % for wheat, maize and soybeans in the arid and semi-arid regions of China. High precipitation and low solar radiation were unfavourable for crop productivity throughout southeastern China and could cause yield losses of approximately 20 % for rice and 50 % for wheat and maize. High temperatures were unfavourable for rice productivity in southwestern China because they induced heat stress, which could cause rice yield losses of approximately 20 %. In contrast, high temperatures and low precipitation were favourable for rice productivity in northeastern and eastern China. We found that the optimum temperatures for high yields were crop specific and had an explicit spatial pattern. These findings improve our understanding of the impacts of extreme climate events on agricultural production in different regions of China.

Abstract: Heat and drought stress can reduce crop yields considerably which is increasingly assessed with crop models for larger areas. Applying these models originally developed for the field scale at large spatial extent typically implies the use of input data with coarse resolution. Little is known about the effect of data resolution on the simulated impact of extreme events like heat and drought on crops. Hence, in this study the effect of input and output data aggregation on simulated heat and drought stress and their impact on yield of winter wheat is systematically analyzed. The crop model SIMPLACE was applied for the period 1980-2011 across Germany at a resolution of 1 km x 1 km. Weather and soil input data and model output data were then aggregated to 10 km x 10 km, 25 km x 25 km, 50 km x 50 km and 100 km x 100 km resolution to analyze the aggregation effect on heat and drought stress and crop yield. We found that aggregation of model input and output data barely influenced the mean and median of heat and drought stress reduction factors and crop yields simulated across Germany. However, data aggregation resulted in less spatial variability of model results and a reduced severity of simulated stress events, particularly for regions with high heterogeneity in weather and soil conditions. Comparisons of simulations at coarse resolution with those at high resolution showed distinct patterns of positive and negative deviations which compensated each other so that aggregation effects for large regions were small for mean or median yields. Therefore, modelling at a resolution of 100 km x 100 km was sufficient to determine mean wheat yield as affected by heat and drought stress for Germany. Further research is required to clarify whether the results can be generalized across crop models differing in structure and detail. Attention should also be given to better understand the effect of data resolution on interactions between heat and drought impacts. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.