TITLE:
Spatially Explicit Modeling of Long-Term Drought Impacts on Crop Production in Austria
AUTHORS:
Franziska Strauss, Elena Moltchanova, Erwin Schmid
KEYWORDS:
Long-Term Drought Modeling; Dry Day Index; Biophysical Impacts; Spatial Variability; EPIC; Austria
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Climate Change,
Vol.2 No.3A,
September
26,
2013
ABSTRACT: Droughts have serious and widespread impacts on crop production with
substantial economic losses. The frequency and severity of drought events may
increase in the future due to climate change. We have developed three meteorological
drought scenarios for Austria in the period 2008-2040. The scenarios are
defined based on a dry day index which is combined with bootstrapping from an
observed daily weather dataset of the period 1975-2007. The severity of
long-term drought scenarios is characterized by lower annual and seasonal
precipitation amounts as well as more significant temperature increases
compared to the observations. The long-term impacts of the drought scenarios on
Austrian crop production have been analyzed with the biophysical process model
EPIC (Environmental Policy Integrated Climate). Our simulation outputs show
that—for areas with historical mean annual precipitation sums below 850
mm— already slight increases in dryness result in significantly lower
crop yields i.e. depending on the
drought severity, between 0.6% and 0.9% decreases in mean annual dry matter
crop yields per 1.0% decrease in mean annual precipitation sums. The EPIC
results of more severe droughts show that spring and summer precipitation may
become a limiting factor in crop production even in regions with historical
abundant precipitation.