Impacts of El Niño Southern Oscillation on the global yields of major crops

Abstract

The monitoring and prediction of climate-induced variations in crop yields, production and export prices in major food-producing regions have become important to enable national governments in import-dependent countries to ensure supplies of affordable food for consumers. Although the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) often affects seasonal temperature and precipitation, and thus crop yields in many regions, the overall impacts of ENSO on global yields are uncertain. Here we present a global map of the impacts of ENSO on the yields of major crops and quantify its impacts on their global-mean yield anomalies. Results show that El Niño likely improves the global-mean soybean yield by 2.1-5.4% but appears to change the yields of maize, rice and wheat by À 4.3 to þ 0.8%. The global-mean yields of all four crops during La Niña years tend to be below normal ( À 4.5 to 0.0%). Our findings highlight the importance of ENSO to global crop production.

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“…In addition, the control simulations will provide a large sample of pre-industrial reference conditions, allowing for robust determination of extreme-value statistics (e.g. the water levels of 100-yearly flood events) and, for example, the typical spatial distribution of impacts associated with certain large-scale circulation patterns such as El Niño (Iizumi et al, 2014;Ward et al, 2014) or other circulation regimes capable of synchronizing the occurrence of extreme events across sectors and regions (Coumou et al, 2014;Francis and Vavrus, 2012). In addition, the preindustrial reference represents more realistic starting (and spin-up) conditions for, for example, the vegetation models or marine ecosystem models, compared to artificial "equilibrium present day" conditions as used in the ISIMIP Fast Track.…”

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