Agricultural production responses to climate variability require salient information to support decisions. If farmers are to benefit from seasonal climate forecasts, the information must be presented in terms of production outcomes at a scale relevant to their decisions. Agricultural outcomes of decisions are more relevant to stakeholders than raw climate information: a farmer is more interested in receiving likely distributions of crop yields or economic returns than a seasonal precipitation forecast. Unfortunately, still there is a gap between the information routinely produced by climate prediction centres and regional climate outlook forums, and the need of farmers and other agricultural decision-makers. A greater capacity is needed to convert raw climate information into distributions of relevant outcomes for agricultural risk assessment and management. An integrated assessment will be developed which couples a stochastic weather generator with a crop simulation model to assess yields and economic returns relevant to crop productions in selected case studies. The weather generator can produce climate scenarios in space and time scales being suitable for crop simulation models, based on historical climatology and modified climatology conditioned on the seasonal forecast. Analysed results of the linked models will provide assessment of likely outcomes and production risks for seasonal forecasts of different seasonal climate scenarios. Furthermore, farmer decisions e.g. cultivar, plating window and configuration, trading water, irrigation scheduling, deficit irrigation will be optimised in a dynamic decision-analytic model which can employ the seasonal climate forecast uncertainty. This research topic is directly related to the Drought and Climate Adaptation Program funded by Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (DAF) to USQ (Project code: DCAP USQ15).

Professor Shahbaz Mushtaq

• Dr Duc-Anh An-Vo

• Computational Engineering and Science Research Centre
• Institute for Agriculture and the Environment
• International Centre for Applied Climate Sciences

• Agriculture, Land and Farm Management
• Applied Mathematics
• Econometrics
• Environmental Science and Management
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics

• Doctor of Philosophy (DPHD)