Future agroclimatic conditions and implications for European grasslands.

Grasslands play a significant role in livestock fodder production and thus, contribute to food security worldwide while providing numerous additional ecosystem services. However, how agroclimatic conditions and adverse weather events relevant for grasslands will change across the European grassland areas has not been examined to date. Using a single reference setup for soil and management over 476 European sites defined by climate stations, we show the probability of eight selected adverse weather events with the potential to significantly affect grassland productivity under climate change and how these events vary regionally across Europe. Changes in these eight key agroclimatic indicators create markedly specific spatial patterns. We found that by 2050, the exposure of the south and west European grasslands to heat and drought may double in comparison with today and that the area with frequent occurrences of heat and drought will expand northwards. However, across Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries to southern Finland and Sweden, the likelihood of these events is likely to decrease. While changing cultivars and management strategies are unavoidable, shifting grassland production to other regions to reduce the risk may not be possible as the risk of adverse events beyond the key grassland-growing areas increases even further. Moreover, we found marked changes in the overall thermal and water regimes across European regions. The effect of adverse weather events in the future could be different in other regions of the world compared to regions in Europe, emphasizing the importance of conducting similar analyses for other major grassland producing regions. To mitigate the impact of climate change, new ways of maintaining grassland productivity need to be developed. These methods include more efficient selection of species mixtures for specific regions, including increased use of legumes and forbs; incorporation of new genetic resources, including the development of hybrid cultivars, such as Festulolium hybrids; and incorporation of state-of-the-art technologies in breeding programs and new grazing management

Evaluación de métodos de homogeneización de series climáticas diarias en el marco del proyecto INDECIS

Ponencia presentada en: XI Congreso de la Asociación Española de Climatología celebrado en Cartagena entre el 17 y el 19 de octubre de 2018.[ES]El proyecto INDECIS (Integrated approach for the development across Europe of user oriented climate indicators for GFCS high-priority sectors: agriculture, disaster risk reduction, energy, health, water and tourism) precisa abordar la homogeneización y control de calidad de series diarias de las variables climáticas esenciales almacenadas en ECAD. Las series de dos regiones diferentes (sur de Suecia y Eslovenia) se analizan para evaluar el tipo, magnitud y frecuencia de las inhomogeneidades a introducir en series de prueba homogéneas generadas a partir del Modelo Climático Regional RACMOv2. Tras aplicarles los métodos de homogeneización disponibles, se compararán sus resultados mediante métricas de bondad de ajuste y se seleccionarán las mejores metodologías para depurar las series almacenadas en ECAD, con objeto de calcular índices climáticos relevantes con los que evaluar el impacto del cambio climático en sectores económicos prioritarios.[EN]The INDECIS project (Integrated approach for the development across Europe of user oriented climate indicators for GFCS high-priority sectors: agriculture, disaster risk reduction, energy, health, water and tourism) needs to address the homogenization and quality control of daily series of the essential climatic variables stored in ECAD. The series of two different regions (southern Sweden and Slovenia) are analyzed to evaluate the type, magnitude and frequency of the inhomogeneities to be introduced in homogeneous test series generated from the Regional Climate Model RACMOv2. After applying the available homogenization methods, their results will be compared by means of goodness of fit metrics and the best methodologies will be selected to debug the series stored in ECAD, in order to calculate relevant climatic indices with which to evaluate the impact of climate change in priority economic sectors.El proyecto INDECIS es parte de ERA4CS, un ERA-NET iniciado por JPI Climate, financiado por FORMAS (SE), DLR (DE), BMWFW (AT), IFD (DK), MINECO (ES), ANR (FR) y co-financiado por la Unión Europea (Grant 690462)

Benchmarking homogenization algorithms for monthly data

The COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action ES0601: Advances in homogenization methods of climate series: an integrated approach (HOME) has executed a blind intercomparison and validation study for monthly homogenization algorithms. Time series of monthly temperature and precipitation were evaluated because of their importance for climate studies. The algorithms were validated against a realistic benchmark dataset. Participants provided 25 separate homogenized contributions as part of the blind study as well as 22 additional solutions submitted after the details of the imposed inhomogeneities were revealed. These homogenized datasets were assessed by a number of performance metrics including i) the centered root mean square error relative to the true homogeneous values at various averaging scales, ii) the error in linear trend estimates and iii) traditional contingency skill scores. The metrics were computed both using the individual station series as well as the network average regional series. The performance of the contributions depends significantly on the error metric considered. Although relative homogenization algorithms typically improve the homogeneity of temperature data, only the best ones improve precipitation data. Moreover, state-of-the-art relative homogenization algorithms developed to work with an inhomogeneous reference are shown to perform best. The study showed that currently automatic algorithms can perform as well as manual ones

The Individualised versus the Public Health Approach to Treating Ebola.

Tom Boyles reflects on differing approaches taken for treating patients with Ebola virus disease in low- and high-resource settings