Evaluating the utility of dynamical downscaling in agricultural impacts projections.

ABSTRACT: Interest in estimating the potential socioeconomic costs of climate change has led to the increasing use of dynamical downscaling--nested modeling in which regional climate models (RCMs) are driven with general circulation model (GCM) output--to produce fine-spatial-scale climate projections for impacts assessments. We evaluate here whether this computationally intensive approach significantly alters projections of agricultural yield, one of the greatest concerns under climate change. Our results suggest that it does not. We simulate US maize yields under current and future CO2 concentrations with the widely used Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer crop model, driven by a variety of climate inputs including two GCMs, each in turn downscaled by two RCMs. We find that no clim

SUBMITTER: Glotter M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4066535 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature