Multivariate Climate-Weather Forecasting System: An Integrated Approach for Mitigating Agricultural Risks in Punjab

Abstract:

While India has a long history of prediction of the All India Monsoon, work on spatially specific attributes of the monsoon, as well as monsoon break periods has only recently emerged. However, from a risk management context, prognostic information of a single variable such as total precipitation or average temperature will be of less utility especially for specific operational purposes. An integrated regional climate-weather forecast system covering precipitation, temperature and humidity etc. over the year will benefit the farmers in the context of a specific decision time table for irrigation scheduling as well as for pre-season crop choices. Hence, contrary to the existing forecasting methods that develop multi time scale information of a single variable at a time, in this paper, we introduce an integrated regional multivariate climate-weather forecasting system that directly relates to agricultural decision making and risk mitigation. These multi-scale risk attributes include mutually dependent, spatially disaggregated statistics such as total rainfall, average temperature, growing degree days, relative humidity, total number of rainfall days/dry spell length, and cumulative water deficits that inform the potential irrigation water requirements for crops. Given that these attributes exhibit mutual dependence across space and time, we propose to explore common ocean-atmospheric conditions from the observations and the state of the art Global Circulation Models (GCMs) that can be utilized as the predictor variables for the forecasting system. Hierarchical Bayesian methods are be used to develop the integrated forecast system. The developed multivariate forecasts will be adapted and disseminated as decision tools for the farmers under the extension projects in Punjab region of India.