Canada must continue seeking out higher resolution data products from space and other sources to monitor its food supply amid climate change, a spokesperson from Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada told attendees of the GeoIgnite Winter Geo conference.
Catherine Champagne, an environmental scientist for the National Agroclimate Information Service at Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, spoke about the matter Wednesday (March 2) at a virtual event.
Canada’s agricultural sector represents $61 billion a year in exports, highlighting an industry that would be quite vulnerable to climate change, Champagne said. Even under a moderate emission scenario, models she showed suggested anywhere from 10- to 50 day-differences in the length of the growing season, with more uncertainty coming during annual cycles.
“In general, the impacts of climate change are not going to be uniform across geographic variability,” she said. “It’s also going to not be uniform across seasons and cross crop types. It’s often pointed out that some regions can be able to grow different crops, with different hybrids, with a longer growing season. But there’s also going to be many challenges that come from climate change. Things like water stress – this includes both excess and limitations in moisture availability. Stress increases pest disease, and these are all going to vary by commodity type.”
Champagne’s group focuses on monitoring global warming and serving as a warning system through a set of models, to better understand climate risks. Her team aims to create analytic tools both used internally and for external partners, including the public, and as is usual for Canadian organizations, much of their work is done through partnerships and collaboration.
The themes they focus on include assessing threats to agriculture, enhancing agricultural production, ensuring sector sustainability, and maintaining datasets to support their work.
The base monitoring system is Canada’s weather station network, which measures precipitation and temperature. “We use this to transform from the kind of weather we get from your daily sort of weather forecasts, to … indices that are more important for agriculture. And these are often things that look at trends over time,” Champagne said.
Doppler radars are also useful, not only for daily rainfall but on a larger timescale, to act as a potential indicator of climate change. For example, Champagne’s group focuses on precipitation percentile, or how much rain an area received compared with the historical normal. Water balance is also measured, to see how much water is available for soil and to attempt to forecast drought conditions.
On the satellite site, Champagne’s group relies often (but not always) on satellites with 30-kilometre resolution. That is admittedly coarse, but it allows the group to receive data daily. “One of the problems with satellites is they don’t measure surface low moisture, so we have to often model this,” she said, suggesting thermal data is the best way to go since it shows surface energy through infrared light.
More recently, NASA has been releasing higher-resolution evapotranspiration data that allows Champagne’s group to support requests for irrigation support, vegetation indicators, biomass trends and other matters of interest to agriculture.
“We’re really focusing on trying to get all of those indicators from thermal and microwave and optical data, and getting them in robust models that are at higher spatial resolution so that we can still cover the entire country,” she said.
The models are not only internally generated, but come from numerous groups and agencies within Canada and internationally, Champagne noted. For example, Environment Canada data on metrics such as precipitation can be repurposed to see how it fits into the normal climate trend for a month, which may serve as an early warning system of extreme weather. The Canadian Drought Monitor is a main tool by which Champagne’s group can forecast drought conditions.
Crowdsourcing is another possible tool for information, collected through the Agroclimate Impact Reporter. This is a monthly survey that allows people to contribute information they see on the ground, to complement what is available through weather stations and satellite imagery. Farmers, for example, can report if they are seeing more pests or disease in their crop.
That information is useful for the Canadian Crop Metrics system that uses satellite data and climate station data, run through numerous biophysical models and a statistical model, which allows Champagne’s group to select predictors for up to 16 crops key to Canada’s economy. The system starts in July and keeps going by September; usually, key indicators become clear around August.
Champagne urged Canadians to work closely with international partners to continue improving geospatial data. The need is real, she said, “to have better [and] more nimble tools to respond to events, to help evaluate long term trends to forecast to support decision-making not only by farmers, but also by the sector.”
She said she is hopeful that spatial resolution and data analysis will continue to improve from satellites and weather stations, “which will strengthen our response to extreme weather as it happens, as people adapt.”