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Abstract
Impact models investigating climate change effects on food safety often need detailed climate data. The aim of this study was to select climate change projection data for selected crop phenology and mycotoxin impact models. Using the ENSEMBLES database of climate model output, this study illustrates how the projected climate change signal of important variables as temperature, precipitation and relative humidity depends on the choice of the climate model. Using climate change projections from at least two different climate models is recommended to account for model uncertainty. To make the climate projections suitable for impact analysis at the local scale a weather generator approach was adopted. As the weather generator did not treat all the necessary variables, an ad-hoc statistical method was developed to synthesise realistic values of missing variables. The method is presented in this paper, applied to relative humidity, but it could be adopted to other variables if needed.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the national funders of the research project EMTOX, including Scandinavia (The Nordic Innovation Centre, The Norwegian Research Council), the Netherlands (the Dutch Ministry for Economics, Agriculture & Innovation), and Cyprus (The Research Promotion Foundation of Cyprus). The ENSEMBLES data used in this work was funded by the EU FP6 Integrated Project ENSEMBLES (Contract number 505539) whose support is gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank Ine van der Fels-Klerx for discussions and very useful comments on the manuscript; and Fredrik Boberg for producing the maps reflecting the ENSEMBLES data.