Climate Impacts

This research line concentrates on three main areas:

• Agriculture: The research focusses on the use of the crop model GLAM developped at the universities of Reading and Leeds.  The work has so far concentrated on the countries of Ethiopia, China and Ghana, and focusses on the use of the model to both montior and predict crop yields in rain-fed agriculture. The research attempts to assess where the uncertainties of crop yield estimates/predictions originate, in terms of model error as well as uncertainties in observations of both meteorological variables and crop yield data. The overall aim is to produce a new crop monitoring and prediction tool for use in developing countries.
• Health: The health application work is based around ICTP's central contribution to the EU QWECI project, which ICTP co-authored, and the EU project HEALTHY FUTURES, due to start in 2011.  As well as investigated improved methods to drive statistical and dynamical health models for vector borne diseases such as malaria with meteorology data, the group is also developing their own in-house dynamical vector model, based on the Liverpool vector model of Hoshen and Morse.
• Water: The water resource component is based around the use of the CHYM dynamical hydrological discharge model, which has been applied to the modelling of the Volta and Niger rivers in Africa with considerable success.  So far this research has concentrated on the calibration of this model for present day climate conditions for various basins, and it's consequent application to future climate scenarios to map potential regions of water scarcity and vulnerability. New research will also apply the model to Ethiopia in collaboration with the national meteorological agency and the water ministry there.

Activity coordinator: Adrian Tompkins

Contributors:

• Sanai Li
• Kathryn Nicklin (CASE student, University of Leeds)
• Rachel Lowe (from Oct 2010)
• Erika Coppola
• Laura Mariotti