Pierre Cantelaube and Jean-Michel Terres
EC-JRC/IES
21020 Ispra, Italy
Francisco J. Doblas-Reyes
ECMWF, Shinfield Park
RG2 9AX, Reading, UK
Proper management of agricultural production is critical for the European Union agricultural policy. Climate
is one of the main factors that directly or indirectly influences the space-time distribution of crop
production. Such production is therefore vulnerable to interannual climate variability and changes in the
historical patterns of regional climate. Because regional distributions of temperature and precipitation in
Europe are affected by changes in the wintertime atmospheric circulation, this study aims at identifying and
quantifying the relationships between the wintertime Euro-Atlantic variability and wheat yield for the Member
States of the European Union. An empirical orthogonal function (EOF) decomposition of the 500hPa geopotential
height fields is used to describe the wintertime climate variability, associating the leading four components
of the EOF decomposition into known climatic patterns (such as North Atlantic Oscillation or Eastern Atlantic
patterns). Using statistical methods such as analysis of variance, linear regression and "leave-one-out"
cross-validation, those patterns are related with time series of wheat yield anomalies.
It is shown that, depending on the country, there is a link between wheat yield and modes of winter climate
variability, that differs from the relationship between temperature and precipitation with the modes. Looking
ahead into the improvement of seasonal climate forecasts, there is an expectation to anticipate such
meteorological patterns with some accuracy, which in turn could improve crop yield forecasts.