Abstract
•A new climate service tool Clisagri has been developed for the agricultural sector.•Clisagri models the risk of unfavourable climate events during crop growth.•Clisagri quantifies drought, wetness, heat stress and cold stress exposure.•Dynamic phenological model enables targeting sensitive growth stages.•Optimization enables optimal variety selection in terms of crop cycle duration.
Crop yields are affected by unfavourable/extreme weather and climate events occurring during sensitive growth stages. Understanding the risks associated with theseevents is essential to adapt agro-management decisions and reduce losses.For this purpose, we propose a targeted climate service integrating a dynamic crop phenology model with an approach based on dedicated agro-climate risk indicators. The initial set of these indicators has been developed in aco-design approach with agronomists and durum wheat farmers participating as end-users in the H2020-MedGOLD project. Four groups of indicators characterize drought events, excessive wetness, cold stress and heat stress during sensitive growth stages.The proposed approach has been fully implemented as an R-package named Clisagri.The packageis complemented with a set of optimization functions, which target optimal variety selection in terms of crop cycle duration.