Florida Consortium - Methodologies

Florida Consortium - Bibliography

Florida Consortium: Methodologies

The Florida Consortium has developed and adopted some common methodologies in our approach to identify climate variability patterns in temperature and precipitation associated with ENSO events and assessment of related impacts in agriculture.

Based on historical Sea Surface Temperature (SST) anomalies for the equatorial Pacific, we note several years can be *designated* as Warm Events (El Niño), Cold Event (El Viejo/La Niña) or Neutral.

How does ENSO impact the climate in the Americas? We are compiling archives of historical climate data (e.g., daily temperature and precipitation) to identify the areas where we expect significant climate impacts.

We will utilize nested, coupled, regional climate models [link to climate forecasting page] to explore the process of using an ENSO forecast system to provide tailored output for various socioeconomic sectors in small regions (our focus is Southeast South America and Southeast US). Our initial focus is on agriculture. While these models have skill in predictions of seasonal climate anomalies, because they cannot resolve the complete spectrum of anomalous climatic behavior required for agricultural purposes, we must rely on methods of "downscaling" the model results.

The integration of weather generators with climate models is a key focus of our research. However, we are developing a method of conditional parameterization of weather generators for ENSO modes.

We are assessing agricultural impact through analysis of historical yields and simulated yield potentials.

Finally, we are building crop management optimization toolkits and programs to explore optimal management options under different ENSO conditions and optimization criteria.

ENSO Year Selection
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We have adopted the ENSO years convention of COAPS/Sittel (COAPS Report 94-2) which relies on an SST Anomaly index from the Japanese Meteorology Agency (JMA). Full details are found here. The categorization of ENSO years for the period 1949 to present is presented below:

The years in each category correspond to the first months of the ENSO year, namely October, November, and December. For example, the ENSO year 1970 starts October 1970 and ends September 1971. We are focusing on extending this ENSO year prior to October and extending it beyond the following September.

A plot of these data show their relative values since 1970.

Cold Phase	Neutral Phase	Warm Phase
1949 1954 1955 1956 1964 1967 1970 1971 1973 1975 1988 1998 1999	1950 1952 1953 1958-1962 1966 1968 1974 1977-1981 1983 1984 1985 1989 1990 1992-1996 2000	1951 1957 1963 1965 1969 1972 1976 1982 1986 1987 1991 1997

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Date of last update: Friday Nov 16, '07