MODEXTREME

The continuous supply of services provided by agricultural systems is increasingly threatened by climate change in association with an estimated increase in the frequency of extreme weather events such as droughts, heat waves or heavy precipitation events.
MODEXTREME has the overarching goal to help the European and non-European agriculture face extreme climatic events by improving the capability of biophysical models simulating vegetation responses to integrate climatic variability and extremes.
To reach this goal, the project will achieve the following objectives:
• Scientific objectives:
- Identify and integrate into simulation models, the responses of main crop and grassland systems to environmental conditions associated with extreme climatic events;
- Improve yield monitoring and forecasting systems via multiple observational constraints to be assimilated into process-based models across different climate conditions;
- Estimate possible trajectories of agricultural productivity in the short (during current season) to medium time horizons and associated uncertainties. This involves taking into account the genetic progress and its effects on responses to extreme environmental conditions.
• Technological objectives:
- Build a consistent, multi-domain data repository for use in studying climate variability and extreme events relevant for agricultural production;
- Develop generically reusable software units that implement libraries of models. This will allow (i) extending the vegetation response, as implemented in existing modelling solutions, to weather extremes, (ii) extending the multi-model platform for plant growth and development simulations of the European Commission Joint Research Centre (MARS: Monitoring Agricultural ResourceS);
- Prototype alternate versions of the workflows for agricultural production monitoring and scenario analysis both using new modelling solutions composed in the project, and by focusing on extreme events.