Annette Hollingshead, Marina Timofeyeva, Fiona Horsfall, and Jenna Meyers Enhancement of Local Climate Analysis Tool (LCAT) to support food resilience Background & Motivation Local Climate Analysis Tool (LCAT) introduced in July 2013, enables studies of climate change impacts at the local level LCAT provides access to local and regional data and analysis methods recommended by NOAA subject matter experts for application at the local level LCAT can extend its utility to provide a beneficial resource to decision makers like water supply managers, farmers, and transportation planners LCAT could leverage variables to analyze local climate impacts and help to ensure crop stability and hence food resilience such as growing degree days, monthly extreme data, and drought indices among many others LCAT potential a valuable agricultural decision-support tool What is LCAT? LCAT can answer agricultural questions by connecting users with the best data sets and analyses and provide clear informative output in the form of statistics, plots and metadata Will I need to plant a more resilient crop variety? What’s the best time to plant & harvest to avoid potential drought? Will soil moisture be optimal? Will climate affect storage and transportation of my crop yield? Which climate model performs best in my region? Data Set: ACIS Monthly Extreme data NWS Forecasters LCAT Analysis: Time series analysis, trends, rate of change Data Set: NCDC Climate Division (CD) Drought data Analysis: Composites, risk assessment Data Set: NCDC Climate Division Soil Moisture data Analysis: Time series analysis, composites Data Set: NCDC CD Cooling Degree Days or CPC Forecast Region Total precipitation Analysis: Composites, risk assessment Data Set: GCM outputs Analysis: downscaling LCAT functions and features http://nws.weather.gov/lcat/ 4 Summary LCAT is a new and evolving climate services tool LCAT can provide a better understanding of how climate change and climate variability contribute to local climate-related hazards such as, the increase of extreme floods, droughts, or severe weather These have a direct impact on food resilience LCAT can be enhanced to facilitate decisions such as favorable planting cycles, crop types, and harvest schedules Future Hopefully this can be a start to collaboration with agricultural planners to evaluate what new requirements are needed in LCAT: Additional data sets and variables New analyses types Desired output formats (graphics, statistics, etc… Future work includes sharpening LCAT to enable region specific agricultural indices LCAT Website
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