CCAFS Climate – Annual reporting 2017: Flagship 2 portfolio

Abstract

After 8 years of existence, and thanks to continuous improvement efforts, the CCAFS Climate portal (http://www.ccafs-climate.org) has continuously been providing free and open access to downscaled climate data, primarily for use in understanding the effects of climate change on agriculture. The portal is timely in delivering high resolution climate change datasets to users, both scientists and non-scientists, all over the world.
Given the importance of this portal for supporting impact and adaptation analyses a new query API was developed in 2016-17, which allows to provide stakeholders with climate change information as well as some agro-climatic indices at real-time data. We calculated a set of indices of crop responses to climate including indicators of drought and heat stress, as well as complementary indicators such as flash-floods (extreme precipitation events) and reductions in crop cycle duration, and overall growing season indicators –i.e. total seasonal precipitation and seasonal mean temperatures.
We also did advances in the integration of CCAFS-Climate with the Climate Wizard tool (available at http://climatewizard.ciat.cgiar.org/). This is a climate data analysis, visualization and dissemination application both for current and future gridded climate data. It provides a wide range of users with synthesized, summarized and packaged climate change information tailored to specific places of interest globally. With the integration, users can do analysis, visualization and dissemination application both for current and future gridded climate data.
In 2017, more than 22.964 people visited the CCAFS-Climate data portal, and more than 50 publications have cited the use of the portal data, bringing the total sum of citations since its creation to almost 520.