Future climate analogues of current wheat production zones in India

The future of agriculture in India will be affected by substantial changes in the environment, although not uniformly across the country. These changes, as projected by the well-known General Circulation Model will grossly impact the food-cropping system. While developing adaptation strategies, it would be useful to understand the current climatic and farming regimes in similar or analogue sites, which have already experienced future conditions. The data used in this article are from a study using the Climate Analogues tool, a web-based tool developed by the Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, which uses spatial and temporal variability in climate projections for different climatic scenarios using the General Circulation Model. Sites with statistically similar climates were thus identified and mapped; these include two sites from four different agro-ecological regions of wheat cropping in India. Comparisons were made specifically for the year 2030, keeping in mind changes in agricultural techniques and mechanisms that could potentially occur over a span of one and a half decades. Temperature was prioritized over other climatic variables in this study, which was conducted using the ECHAM model for the A2 scenario. A comparison of the current yields of the selected sites with those of the future analogue sites revealed the former to be at low, moderate or high risk, in accordance with the projected future climatic conditions for wheat cultivation. Most sites appeared to be at moderate risk due to temperature increase at these sites by the year 2030, and except for two sites, had significantly reduced yields.