title: CropWatch agroclimatic indicators (CWAIs) for weather impact assessment on global agriculture.
abstract: CropWatch agroclimatic indicators (CWAIs) are a monitoring tool developed by the CropWatch global crop monitoring system in the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS; www.cropwatch.com.cn , Wu et al Int J Digital Earth 7(2):113-137, 2014, Wu et al Remote Sens 7:3907-3933, 2015). Contrary to most other environmental and agroclimatic indicators, they are "agronomic value-added", i.e. they are spatial values averaged over agricultural areas only and they include a weighting that enhances the contribution of the areas with the largest production potential. CWAIs can be computed for any time interval (starting from dekads) and yield one synthetic value per variable over a specific area and time interval, for instance a national annual value. Therefore, they are very compatible with socio-economic and other variables that are usually reported at regular time intervals over administrative units, such as national environmental or agricultural statistics. Two of the CWAIs are satellite-based (RAIN and Photosynthetically Active radiation, PAR) while the third is ground based (TEMP, air temperature); capitals are used when specifically referring to CWAIs rather than the climate variables in general. The paper first provides an overview of some common agroclimatic indicators, describing their procedural, systemic and normative features in subsequent sections, following the terminology of Binder et al Environ Impact Assess Rev 30:71-81 (2010). The discussion focuses on the systemic and normative aspects: the CWAIs are assessed in terms of their coherent description of the agroclimatic crop environment, at different spatial scales (systemic). The final section shows that the CWAIs retain key statistical properties of the underlying climate variables and that they can be compared to a reference value and used as monitoring and early warning variables (normative).
authors.affiliation: Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: René
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7173-3354
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Gommes
authors.affiliation: Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. wubf@radi.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Bingfang
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Ning
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Xueliang
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.affiliation: Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Hongwei
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zeng
authors.affiliation: Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Zhongyuan
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Institute of Remote Sensing and Digital Earth, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Bo
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Chen
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture; D018556:Crops, Agricultural; D058998:Remote Sensing Technology; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014887:Weather
keywords: Agroclimatic indicators; Crop monitoring; CropWatch; Early warning; Scaling