Modeling Crop Productivity Using a Coupled Modeling Framework

Atul Jain, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Crop growth is influenced by changes in the environmental conditions, such as climate and atmospheric CO2 concentration [CO2], and agricultural management, such as irrigation and nitrogen fertilizer. However, the magnitude of these changes remains uncertain, and understanding of the interactions of environmental factors with crop management practices remains incomplete. This is mainly because weather and regional climate coupled model systems, which are used to study the interaction of the atmosphere with the land surface, lacks representation of agricultural crop-specific processes and their interactions with regional climate. The objective of this project is to study interactions between food crop-specific growth processes, regional climate, [CO2], and management practices (i.e., irrigation and N fertilizer) in the United States using a modeling approach. Here, we propose to explore this interactive link using a process-based land surface model, Integrated Science Assessment Model (ISAM), and coupled with a regional modeling system, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Such coupled model simulations can currently only be performed on a petascale machine, such as Blue Waters.