The Climatology of Climate Extremes in the World’s Major Growing Regions

Abstract:

A stable food supply is increasingly important as global populations grow and climate variability and extremes affect crop yields. It is therefore critical to quantify the occurrence of extremes in major growing regions globally to understand the vulnerability of the global food supply to climate. First, we grid the GHCN historical climate data and evaluate the effect of gridding on estimation of agriculturally relevant climate extremes, such as heat waves, consecutive dry days, and precipitation intensity. We find that the differences between gridded indices and the raw station indices are small, mostly less than 10%. We then evaluate the climatology of climate extremes and the probability of concurrent extremes, both within one growing region and across multiple regions globally. We find that the correlation of two precipitation or temperature related indices are quite strong, such that the probability of another extreme occurring increases given the occurrence of one extreme. These results provide estimations of the global food supply’s vulnerability to climate variability and extremes, which is critical for planning in the coming decades with projections of more frequent and more intense climate extremes.