Determining the historical and future impact of excess water limitation on winter wheat yields in Switzerland

Climate change is bringing many changes including higher temperatures, extreme weather, and changes in our agricultural systems. These changes will all have damaging effects to the patterns we currently know including deaths by high temperatures, damages to infrastructure from extreme events, and changes to crop yields. Agricultural models are used to try and understand how climate change will affect crop growth and crop yield.

This research project aims to understand how winter wheat (Triticum aestivum) yields have been impacted historically by excessive rainfall events and to project how yields will be affected by a future increase in precipitation. I use future climate projections (RCP 2.6, 4.5, and 8.5) from the CH2018 dataset (CH2018 Project Team, 2018) and historical rainfall reconstruction data (Imfeld et al., 2022) in a crop model to simulate winter wheat harvest yields for the years of 1763-2100. The files used in the crop model were optimized for the most accurate outcome using Switzerland’s climate. The model used is PCSE (Python Crop Simulation Environment) and the PCSE output yields using historical reconstructions are then compared to observed yields to determine the accuracy of the model in relation to this project. From there, conclusions will be drawn about the future of winter wheat yields under a changing climate that is projected to have an increase in precipitation. 

 

CH2018 Project Team (2018): CH2018 - Climate Scenarios for Switzerland. National Centre for Climate Services. doi: 10.18751/Climate/Scenarios/CH2018/1.0

Imfeld, Noemi; Pfister, Lucas; Brugnara, Yuri; Brönnimann, Stefan (2022): Daily high-resolution temperature and precipitation fields for Switzerland from 1763 to 2020 [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.950236.