Agricultural Meteorology
S.F. Ziaei Asl; A.A. Sabziparvar
Abstract
Introduction: It is possible to guide the agricultural experts to achieve a suitable genotype and adapt to climatic conditions in proportion to the length of the modified growing season by identifying the impact of climate change in recent years on the cumulative rate of degree-days of plant growth. ...
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Introduction: It is possible to guide the agricultural experts to achieve a suitable genotype and adapt to climatic conditions in proportion to the length of the modified growing season by identifying the impact of climate change in recent years on the cumulative rate of degree-days of plant growth. This will prevent the waste of capital and agricultural inputs and ultimately prevent the reduction of the final crop due to the mismatch of genotype-crop with the current climate. In the present study, an attempt has been made to study and compare the trend in the start and end of the growing season, the growing season length (GSL), and growing degree-days(GDD) during 1959-2018 in the elevated and coastal areas of Iran.Materials and Methods: For this study, the daily temperature of 27 synoptic stations were used including 19 stations in elevated areas and 8 stations in coastal areas during 1959-2018. The first day with a minimum daily temperature equal to or greater than 0, 5, and 10 °C was considered as the start of the growing season (SGS). Moreover, the first day after the start of the growing season which has a minimum daily temperature of less than 0, 5, and 10 °C was considered as the end of the growing season (EGS). Trend analysis was performed in time series of GSL and GDD based on thresholds of 0, 5, and 10 °C using the Mann-Kendall test. To compare the results, the statistical period of 60 years was divided into two periods of 30 years (1959-1988 and 1989-2018). In both periods, the statistical characteristics of the GSL and GDD based on the three thresholds mentioned in coastal and elevated areas were surveyed and compared. In this study, deviation from the mean was used to complete the study of changes in the GSL. This index shows the scatter of data around the mean.Results and Discussion: The GSL extension came from both the advance in SGS and the delay in EGS. Comparison results of the two 30-year periods (1959-1988 and 1989-2018) showed that during 1989-2018, in most stations the GSL has increased. During this period, based on 0 °C, the earliest and latest SGS were on February 24 and April 30 in Yazd and Shahrekord, respectively. Accordingly, the earliest and latest EGS were on October 15 and December 11 in Shahrekord and Gorgan, respectively. Based on 5 °C, the earliest and latest SGS were on February 10 and June 2 in Abadan and Gorgan, respectively. Accordingly, the earliest and latest EGS on September 17 and December 6 were at Shahrekord, Bam, and Abadan, respectively. Based on 10 °C, the earliest and latest SGS was on February 11 and June 20 at stations, respectively. Accordingly, the earliest and latest EGS were on August 27 and December 8 in Shahrekord and Bushehr, respectively. The shortest and longest GSLs based on all three thresholds of 0, 5, and 10 °C were Shahrekord and Bandar Abbas, respectively. The highest and lowest coefficient of variation of GSL were 20.8% in Zanjan and 4.9% in Bandar Abbas, respectively. Based on 0, 5, and 10 °C, the lowest GDDs in GSL are 3233, 1767, and 880 °C.d, respectively, and all of them were obtained at Shahrekord. On the other hand, the highest GDD0, GDD5, and GDD10 in GSL were 6783, 7372, and 5761 °C.d, respectively, in Yazd, Abadan, and Bandar Abbas. The most significant trend in GSL was in Zanjan, Zahedan, and Khorramabad.Conclusion: Examination of changes in the GSL indicates the existence of a significant trend in a limited number of stations. Also, with increasing the threshold from 0 to 5 and from 5 to 10 °C, there is a significant decreasing trend in more stations. At the threshold of 10 °C a significant and decreasing trend of GSL was observed in Urmia, Sanandaj, Khorramabad, Birjand, and Bandar Abbas stations, In following, a significant increasing trend was observed in Tabriz, Tehran, Kermanshah, Isfahan, Yazd, and Bushehr stations. The results of the studies showed fewer changes in the time series of the GSL based on thresholds of 0 and 5 °C in the statistical period of 1989-2018. On the other hand, the results showed that the GSL trend is significant in more stations in the recent period based on the threshold of 10 °C. Deviation from the average GSL in coastal areas was greater than the elevated areas so that the GSL based on 10 °C in both areas increased with greater slope and continuity. This increasing trend of deviation from the average in the coastal areas from the early '70s and the elevated areas from the early '90s and continues until now. In this regard, Bandar Abbas station and then Bushehr station had the longest GSL, and Shahrekord station had the shortest GSL among other stations which has been studied. Comparison of GDDs of the GSL during 1989-2018 showed the decrease of GDDs from south to north and from west to east of the country. Accordingly, in the southern stations of the country, the conditions for tropical plants (threshold of 10 °C) have become more suitable than the cold stations of the west and northwest, Time series analysis of the average annual GDDs based on the three thresholds during 1989-2018 showed a significant increasing (positive) trend in 93% of the stations. During the second 30-years period, Shahrekord and Shiraz stations did not show a significant trend in all three mentioned thresholds. However, the analysis of the annual average of GDDs during 1959-1988 showed the trend in 41% of the stations. According to the results of this study, it can be concluded that in cold regions, due to the increase in GDDs, the supply of cooling units for plants with certain cooling needs is more difficult. In the south of the country, as the total required GDD is achieved earlier, the GSL gets shorter, and therefore less dry biomass will accumulate in the product. This likely leads to a reduction in crop yields in this part of the country.
Farshad Ahmadi; Mohammad Nazeri Tahroudi; Rasoul Mirabbasi Najaf Abadi
Abstract
Introduction: Climate change in the current century is an important environmental challenge facing the world. Increase in atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases such as CO2 as a result of human activities has caused a change in a number of hydroclimatic parameters. Climate change and global warming ...
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Introduction: Climate change in the current century is an important environmental challenge facing the world. Increase in atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases such as CO2 as a result of human activities has caused a change in a number of hydroclimatic parameters. Climate change and global warming are the most important issues that have attracted many attentions in recent years. Climatic changes have interpreted as significant changes in average weather over a long period (Salari and ghandomkar, 2012). Global warming may cause drastic fluctuations in various processes and also it can significantly affect mean and variance of relative humidity, precipitation, solar radiation and etc. Global warming phenomena can change the components of the hydrological cycle and re-distribute the world's water resources in time and space. This may exacerbate desertification in arid and semi-arid countries such as Iran (Ahmadi and Radmanesh, 2014). Therefore, a large part of hydroclimatic researches has focused on temperature trend analysis at different spatial and temporal scales,
Materials and Methods: In the present study, the long-term temperature data from 24 climatological stations uniformly distributed over the West Azarbayjan province during 1981-2013 were used for investigating the temperature trends. The aim of trend test is to specify whether an increasing or decreasing trend exists in time series. Since parametric tests have some assumptions such as normality, stability, and independence of variables which may not be valid for most hydrologic series, the nonparametric methods are more preferred in meteorological and hydrological studies. In addition, the nonparametric trend analysis methods are less sensitive to extreme values compared to parametric trend tests. Nonparametric tests can also be applied regardless of linearity or nonlinearity of time series trend (Khalili et al. 2015). One of the most well-known nonparametric tests is the Mann–Kendall test (Mann 1945; Kendall 1975). Existence of more than one significant autocorrelation among data is long-term persistence (LTP). The presence of LTP in time series results in the underestimation of serial correlation and overestimation of the significance of the Mann-Kendall test (Koutsoyiannis 2003). In addition, Koutsoyiannis and Montanari (2007) pointed out that the Hurst phenomenon (Hurst 1951) is one of the most major sources of uncertainty in hydrometeorological trend analysis. Hamed (2008) studied the impact of LTP and Hurst phenomenon on the Mann–Kendall test, and Kumar et al. (2009) named it as the MK4. Since the MK3 test (Mann-Kendall method after the removal of the effect of all significant auto-correlation coefficients) is a generalized version of the MK2 (Mann-Kendall method after removing the effect of significant lag-1 auto-correlation), the MK3 and MK4 tests were used in this study and explained briefly in the following sections according to Kumar et al. (2009) and Dinpashoh et al. (2014). In the current study, the MK4 test was employed.
Results and Discussion: In this study, the mean monthly and annual air temperature trends were investigated using non-parametric Mann-Kendall test by considering the Hurst coefficient (MK4) for West Azarbayjan province. The Sen's slope estimator was also used for estimation of the slope of the trend line. Results indicate that 71% of selected stations (17 stations out of 24 considered stations) experienced a significant positive trend and only 7 stations (%29 of studied stations) did not show a significant upward trend in annual temperature time series. The highest increasing temperature rate (0.12 °C/Year) in annual timescale was found in Chehriq station. On monthly time scale, the numbers of months with increasing trends were 6 times greater than those with negative trends. Most of the stations had significant positive trends in mean temperature in February and March, Moreover, according to calculated Sen's slope, the mean air temperature of West Azarbayjan province increased by 0.05 °C/Year (1.65 °C during the study period).
Conclusion: The results show that the temperature of West Azarbayjan province substantially increased. The temperature increment can cause more drought occurrence and crop yield loss. As most of people’s income in this province depends on agricultural activates, temperature rise seems to have led to many social and economic problems in our studied area. Further, drying up of Urmia Lake and decreasing water input to the Urmia Lake basin can intensify the environmental problems.
Amirhosein Aghakhani Afshar; Yousef Hassanzadeh; Ali Asghar Besalatpour; Mohsen Pourreza Bilondi
Abstract
Introduction: Hydrology cycle of river basins and water resources availability in arid and semi-arid regions are highly affected by climate changes, so that recently the increase of temperature due to the increase of greenhouse gases have led to anomaly in the Earth’ climate system. At present, General ...
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Introduction: Hydrology cycle of river basins and water resources availability in arid and semi-arid regions are highly affected by climate changes, so that recently the increase of temperature due to the increase of greenhouse gases have led to anomaly in the Earth’ climate system. At present, General Circulation Models (GCMs) are the most frequently used models for projection of different climatic change scenarios. Up to now, IPCC has released four different versions of GCM models, including First Assessment Report models (FAR) in 1990, Second Assessment Report models (SAR) in 1996, Third Assessment Report models (TAR) in 2001 and Fourth Assessment Report models (AR4) in 2007. In 2011, new generation of GCM, known as phase five of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) released which it has been actively participated in the preparation of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fifth Assessment report (AR5). A set of experiments such as simulations of 20th and projections of 21st century climate under the new emission scenarios (so called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)) are included in CMIP5. Iran is a country that located in arid and semi-arid climates mostly characterized by low rainfall and high temperature. Anomalies in precipitation and temperature in Iran play a significant role in this agricultural and quickly developing country. Growing population, extensive urbanization and rapid economic development shows that Iran faces intensive challenges in available water resources at present and especially in the future. The first purpose of this study is to analyze the seasonal trends of future climate components over the Kashafrood Watershed Basin (KWB) located in the northeastern part of Iran and in the Khorsan-e Razavi province using fifth report of Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC) under new emission scenarios with Mann-Kendall (MK) test. Mann-Kendall is one of the most commonly used nonparametric tests to detect climatic changes in time series and trend analysis. The second purpose of this study is to compare CMIP5 models with each other and determine the changes in rainfall and temperature in the future periods in compare with base period on seasonal scale in all parts of this basin.
Materials and Methods: In this research, keeping in view the importance of precipitation and temperature parameters, fourteen models obtained from the General Circulation Models (GCMs) of the newest generation in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) were used to forecast the future climate changes in the study area. In historical time (1992-2005), simulated data of these models were compared with observed data (34 rainfall and 12 temperature stations) using four evaluation criteria for goodness-of-fit including Nash-Sutcliffe (NS), Percent of Bias (PBIAS), coefficient of determination (R2) and the ratio of the root mean square error to the standard deviation of measured data (RSR). Furthermore, all models have a very good rating performance for all of the evaluation criteria and therefore investigation is done for precipitation data as an important component in survey of climate subject to select the optimum models in kashafrood watershed basin.
Results and Discussion: By comparing four evaluation criteria for fourteen models of CMIP5 during historical time, finally, four climate models, including GFDL-ESM2G, IPSL-CM5A-MR, MIROC-ESM and NorESM1-M which indicated more agreement with observed data according to the evaluation criteria were selected. Furthermore, four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) of new emission scenario, namely RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP8.5 were extracted, interpolated and then under three future periods, including near-century (2006-2037), mid-century (2037-2070) and late-century (2070-2100) were investigated and compered.
Conclusions: The results of Mann-Kendall test which was applied to examine the trend, revealed that the precipitation have variable positive and negative trends which were statistically significant. In addition, mean temperature have a significant positive trend with 90, 99 and 99.9% confidence level. In seasonal scale, survey of climatic variable (rainfall and mean temperature) showed that the maximum and minimum of precipitations occur during spring and summer and mean temperature in all seasons is higher than historical baseline, respectively. Maximum and minimum of mean temperature occur in summer and winter, and the amount of seasonal precipitation in these seasons will be reduced. Finally, across all parts of kashafrood watershed basin, rainfall and mean temperature will be reduced and increased, respectively. In conclusion, models of CMIP5 can simulate the future climate change in this region and four models of CMIP5 can be used for this region.
A.R. Araghi; M. Mousavi Baygi; majid hashemi nia
Abstract
Introduction: Studying long-term trend changes of meteorological parameters is one of the routine methods in atmospheric studies, especially in the climate change subject. Among the meteorological parameters, temperature is always considered as one of the most atmospheric elements and studying it in ...
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Introduction: Studying long-term trend changes of meteorological parameters is one of the routine methods in atmospheric studies, especially in the climate change subject. Among the meteorological parameters, temperature is always considered as one of the most atmospheric elements and studying it in order to gain a better understanding of the climate change phenomenon, has been effective. In addition to identifying trends, extraction of oscillatory patterns in the atmospheric phenomena and parameters occurrence can be an applicable and reliable method to explore the complex relations between atmospheric-oceanic cycles and short term or long term consequences of meteorological parameters.
Materials and Methods: In this paper, monthly average temperature time series in Mashhad synoptic station in 55 years period (from 1956 to 2010) in monthly, seasonal, annual and seasons separately (winter, spring, summer and autumn) have been analyzed. Discrete wavelet transform and Mann-Kendall trend test were the main methods for performing this research. Wavelet transform is a powerful method in signal processing and it is an advanced version of short time Fourier transforms. Moreover, it has many improvements and more capabilities compared with Fourier transform. In the first step, temperature time series in various time scales (which was mentioned above) have been decomposed via discrete wavelet transforms into approximation (A) and detail (D) components. For the second step, Mann-Kendall trend test was applied to the various combinations of these decomposed components. For detecting the most dominant periodic component for each of the time scales datasets, results of Mann-Kendall test for the original time series and the decomposed components were compared to each other. The nearest value indicated the most dominant periodicity based on the D component’s level. To detect the similarity between results of the Mann-Kendall test, relative error method was employed. Additionally, it must be noted that before applying Mann-Kendall test, time series has to be assessed for its autocorrelation status. If there are seasonality patterns in the studied time series or lag-1 autocorrelation coefficient of data is significant, then some modified versions of the Mann-Kendall test have to be employed.
Results and Discussion: Results of this study showed that the temperature trend at every time scaled dataset (monthly, seasonal, annual and seasons separately) is positive and significant. Autocorrelation coefficients indicated that only seasonal time series and winter datasets did not have significant ACFs. On the other hand, monthly and seasonal datasets had seasonality pattern. Based on these results, Hirsch and Slack’s modified version of Mann-Kendall test was employed for monthly and seasonal time series and for the winter temperature data, the original version of the Mann-Kendall test was applied. For the remaining time series, the Hamed and Rao’s modified version of the Mann-Kendall trend test was employed. Dominant periodicities in monthly, seasonal and annual, confirmed the oscillatory behavior of each other. However, in the seasons, it seems that periodic patterns with the same temperature ranges are more similar. On the other hand, due to the greater similarity between the results of the Mann-Kendall test in the warmer seasons and the data with monthly, seasonal and annual time scale, it seems that yearly warm period has more noticeable impacts on the positive and significant trend of temperature in the study area. It must be noted that in any of the studied time series, results of the Mann-Kendall test for detail (D) component was not significant and after adding approximation (A) component, Mann-Kendall statistics turned to a significant value. This happens because the long term variations or trends appear in approximation components in most of the time series.
Conclusion: In this study, a powerful signal processing method called wavelet transform was employed to detect the most dominant periodic components in temperature time series in various time scales, in Mashhad synoptic station. Results showed that using frequency-time analysis methods has more benefits compared with the use of only classic statistical methods, since one can explore any time series with more accuracy. Because most of the meteorological variables have periodic structures, it seems that using advanced signal processing methods like wavelet for analysis of these variables can have many advantages compared with linear-based methods. It can be suggested for future studies to use and employ signal processing methods for exploring the large scaled phenomena (e.g. ENSO, NAO, etc.) and discovering the relationship between these phenomena and climate change in recent decades.
Keywords: Discrete wavelet transforms, Mann-Kendall test, Oscillatory pattern, Trend
F. Ahmadi; F. Radmanesh
Abstract
The temperature is one of the essential elements in formation of climate and its changes can alter the climate of each region, Therefore study of temperature changes at different spatial and temporal scales is devoted a large part of research to climatology. The mean temperature changes of the northern ...
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The temperature is one of the essential elements in formation of climate and its changes can alter the climate of each region, Therefore study of temperature changes at different spatial and temporal scales is devoted a large part of research to climatology. The mean temperature changes of the northern half area of Iran (18 Synoptic stations) in monthly or annual scales (1961-2010) are tested with using non-parametric Mann-Kendall test and elimination of all auto-correlation coefficients. To determine the slope of temperature gradient, the Sen’s slope estimation method was used. The results showed that 61% of the stations have experienced a significant increase in annual scale, in expect of Urmia, Zanjan, Qazvin and Gorgan stations. Arak is also a significant decrease, Torbate Heydarie and Saghez have experienced non-significant negative trend in annual scale. In monthly scale, number of months with increasing trend was greater than decreasing trend. April, September and October have significant increasing trend in most stations. December has lowest changing in compare with others. In conclusion, the studied temperature area in past half century 1.15 C is increased
