Enhancing capacities in the field of agrometeorology: developing climatological crop calendars.

ccording to Food and Agriculture Organization for the United Nations (FAO), over 735 million people faced hunger in 2022. Less developed countries, where subsistence agriculture is a major livelihood, suffer disproportionately the effects of food insecurity. Weather, climate variability and climate change alter in time and space the phenological stages of crops and, therefore, agricultural planning and production. Climatological crop calendars for rainfed agriculture can be generated in the intertropical areas using time series of daily accumulated rainfall. They convey actionable information about the start and the end of the rainy season and, coupled with information on the crop's growing cycle length, allow to produce estimations for early, normal and late planting periods for different crops.  

In cooperation with the World Meteorological Organization and the project Climate Risk and Early Warning Systems Initiative (CREWS) in West Africa, the C3/IU-RESCAT/URV has developed a series of tools to support the generation of climatological crop calendars. We adopted a "from data to service" approach, guiding five National Meteorological and Hydrological Services in the region (in alphabetical order, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger and Togo) from the quality control of the raw rainfall time series to the generation of the crop calendar. The cooperation started with a first workshop in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso, 2019), continued on-line through the COVID-19 pandemia and has gained momentum in since 2024 after a workshop on Lomé (Togo). The cooperation includes easy to use software applications, short scientific missions, and a dedicated Moodle site to facilitate training and self-training events and a guidelines document.  

In this contribution, we walk through the software tools created and the contents of the moodle site, as well as examples of crop calendars for the different agroclimatic zones in West Africa and their practical application.