Impacts of El Niño Southern Oscillation on the global yields of major crops
Top Cited Papers
Open Access
- 15 May 2014
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature Communications
- Vol. 5 (1), 3712
- https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms4712
Abstract
The monitoring and prediction of climate-induced variations in crop yields, production and export prices in major food-producing regions have become important to enable national governments in import-dependent countries to ensure supplies of affordable food for consumers. Although the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) often affects seasonal temperature and precipitation, and thus crop yields in many regions, the overall impacts of ENSO on global yields are uncertain. Here we present a global map of the impacts of ENSO on the yields of major crops and quantify its impacts on their global-mean yield anomalies. Results show that El Niño likely improves the global-mean soybean yield by 2.1—5.4% but appears to change the yields of maize, rice and wheat by −4.3 to +0.8%. The global-mean yields of all four crops during La Niña years tend to be below normal (−4.5 to 0.0%). Our findings highlight the importance of ENSO to global crop production.Keywords
This publication has 34 references indexed in Scilit:
- El Niño modulations over the past seven centuriesNature Climate Change, 2013
- Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050PLOS ONE, 2013
- Addressing uncertainty in adaptation planning for agricultureProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013
- REVIEW OF SEASONAL CLIMATE FORECASTING FOR AGRICULTURE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICAExperimental Agriculture, 2011
- Impact of Global Ocean Surface Warming on Seasonal-to-Interannual Climate PredictionJournal of Climate, 2011
- MIRCA2000—Global monthly irrigated and rainfed crop areas around the year 2000: A new high‐resolution data set for agricultural and hydrological modelingGlobal Biogeochemical Cycles, 2010
- Operational seasonal forecasting of crop performancePhilosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 2005
- Relations between sea‐surface temperature and crop yields in ArgentinaInternational Journal of Climatology, 2003
- A dipole mode in the tropical Indian OceanNature, 1999
- Global and Regional Scale Precipitation Patterns Associated with the El Niño/Southern OscillationMonthly Weather Review, 1987