Climate Data for Agricultural Applications: Downscaling and Scenarios

Dear Colleagues,

Atmosphere dedicates this Special Issue to climate data for agricultural applications with a focus on climate downscaling and future climate scenarios. Climate data are essential for a wide range of agricultural applications, including climate risk assessements, crop yield forecasting, and climate change impacts and adaptation studies. In addition to climate data observed at climate stations, data derived from remote sensing data, numerical weather forecasts, and climate simulations are increasingly becoming essential for agricutlural applications. Spatial and temporal scales of these data are required to match those in the agricultural applications, where field sizes are small and often the base unit for crop simulation models. Downscaling the output of global climate models (GCMs), for example, is widely considered necessary for climate change impact studies to be relevant. Furthermore, future climate scenarios are the basis for climate change impacts and adaptation studies, and the scale of these data sets contributes to the uncertainty of the projected climate change impacts on the agricultural sector. The development and use of future climate scenarios will play an important role in climate change impacts and adaptation studies for the agricultural sector.

Original research and review papers, methodologies, and applications related to the development of climate data for use in the agricutural sector are welcome. Authors are especially encouraged to present studies on methodologies of downscaling weather forecast/climate model outputs for regional and local agricultural applications including, but not limited to, crop growth simulations, climate extremes and risk analysis, yield forecasting, and greenhouse gase emissions.Discussions on how to derive and interprete climate information for agricultural applications and the associated uncertainties are also encouraged.

Dr. Catherine Champagne
Dr. Budong Qian
Prof. Zhi Li
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Atmosphere is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.