The Global Agriculture Sectoral Information System (SIS) project has developed climate services in support of decision-making in these contexts. It does so in a process of co-creation with partners representing international crop research, international agricultural policy development and commercial agricultural consultancy services. Four categories of data products haven been produced:
Contemporary and historic climate data for downstream further analysis and forcing of agricultural impact models, both gridded and location specific. We developed a version of ERA5 with a set of indicators specifically relevant for use in agricultural studies, aggregated to daily time scales, but downscaled to a higher spatial resolution: AgERA5
Contemporary and future climate indicators and statistics relevant for climate change impact studies for agriculture, if needed tailored using crop-specific parameters (e.g. thermal requirements). These are based on bias-adjusted projections from a representative subset of the CMIP5 ensemble (5 models x 4 RCPs), aggregated to dekads (10day periods).
Contemporary climate enhanced, Earth observation based indicators of crop productivity (harvest index), crop development and evapotranspiration. Data have been produced for each of four crops – wheat, maize, soybean and rice) for all areas where each is dominant.
Agriculturally relevant water resource indicators, such as those for soil moisture, surface- and groundwater availability, river discharge and reservoir status. These are based on hydrological model simulations that were forced by either historic and contemporary data, seasonal forecasts and climate change projections.
All data can be accessed, processed and visualised, using generic and a few dedicated functions in the Toolbox. The latter allow spatial masking or aggregation to crop areas, and temporary aggregation (a.o. based on the dekad time step) to globally distributed cropping calendars.