WATER RESEARCH COMMISSION - Project# - UCT
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WATER RESEARCH COMMISSION Project# K5/2496/4 Project Title# Seamless forecasting of rainfall and temperature for adaptation of farming practices to climate variability Submission Date# 07 May 2018 (due 30 April 2018) Deliverable# 10 - Annual Report 2018, Report on all work done in year 1, 2 and 3 of the project Compiled by# Dr. Olivier CRESPO, University of Cape Town (UCT) Ms Feroza Morris, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Mr Trevor Lumsden, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Co-authors# Prof. Joseph Francis, University of Venda (UNIVEN) Dr. Leocadia Zhou, University of Fort Hare (UFH) Dr. Gugulethu Zuma-Netshiukhwi, Agricultural Research Council (ARC) Prof. Willem Landman, university of Pretoria (UP) Dr Michele Toucher, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Prof Roland Schulze, University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) Mr Zane Dedekind, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Mr Cobus Olivier, South African Weather Service (SAWS) Mr Isaac Ngwane, South African Weather Service (SAWS) Ms Elelwani Phaduli, South African Weather Service (SAWS) Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 1/12
Lead Institution University of Cape Town Dr. Olivier CRESPO with: Climate System Analysis Group Mr. Siyabusa Mkuhlani University of Cape Town Mr. Farirai Rusere Ms. Luleka Dlamini Mr Trevor Lumsden Mr Zane Dedkind Council for Scientific and Industrial Dr Francois Engelbrecht Research Dr Asmeron Beraki Prof Joseph Francis with: University of Venda Ms. A.E. Hlaiseka Mr. T. Mutheiwana Dr Leocadia Zhou with: University of Fort Hare Mr Martin M. Chari Mrs Khululwa N. Xoxo Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 2/12
Mr David Clark
Prof Roland Schulze
Dr Michele Toucher
University of KwaZulu-Natal
with
Mrs. Feroza Morris
Dr. Gugulethu
Agricultural Research Council
Zuma-Netshiukhwi
Prof. Willem Landman University of Pretoria
Mr Cobus Olivier
Mrs Elelwani Phaduli South African Weather Service
Mr Isaac Ngwana
Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 3/12Context The African population is one of the fastest growing in the world and the continent has a large potential for agricultural growth and development. Definition of agricultural production strategies that will help prepare Africa for higher demand and worsening climate stresses must take into account various factors including political drive, infrastructure development, technical progresses, social livelihood and economic growth. Apart from long-term adaptation necessary to improve food production, immediate needs and food security demand similar studies focusing on shorter term challenges and how to cope with climate variability that directly impacts year-by-year production. South Africa’s repeated exposure to severe climate events combined with its financial and structural capacity to improve can play a major role in exploiting the capacity of climate and crop models to digest enormous data sets into useful tailored information needed for decision making. Although models are only a partial representation of reality, their exploration capacity is useful and they are intensively used at larger time/space scales. Technical challenges such as forecast skills or spatial representation make shorter time scale studies more demanding. However, these time and space scales are indispensable to provide appropriate information that farming communities are continuously requesting. Various international research projects have identified those efforts as a priority to respond to climate risk vulnerability. However, there are currently no such projects in South Africa. The proposed research work directly follows on from a previous WRC project11, which explored the application of weather and climate forecasts in agricultural decision-making. This included applying weather and climate forecasts within hydrological models to produce water-related forecasts. The aim of the current study is to develop a set of tools allowing for an operational and robust climate-crop-water integrated assessment of the production of medium-scale agricultural forecasts (including water demand). Acknowledgements SASRI are acknowledged for their cooperation in providing data and information regarding their crop forecasting and on-farm water allocation tools. This assists in ensuring the relevance of the irrigation water availability forecasts being developed in this project to stakeholders in the Mhlatuze catchment. 1 Lumsden and Schulze, 2102. Lumsden, TG and Schulze, RE (Eds) 2012. Development and applications of rainfall forecasts for agriculturally-related decision-making in selected catchments of South Africa. Water Research Commission, Pretoria, RSA, WRC report TT 538/12. pp 207. Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 4/12
Summary of progresses and challenges
Expenditures: on track
Deliverable 1 to 9 have been delivered, accepted and invoiced for. Accordingly, payments from
WRC to UCT, as well as payments from UCT to its partners are on schedule (granting the
contract has been finalised). All partner’s expenses apart from UCT and UKZN, are dedicated to
Human Resources costs.
As expected from the budget’s amounts/timing discussed during the proposal development
phase, the project early stages amounts allocated are rather constraining. The project team
managed nonetheless to use those funds as best as possible, and especially for the realisation of
two more successful farmer and expert’s stakeholders in 1-Alice, Eastern Cape and 2-Lambani,
Limpopo.
The project finance will not allow for a third and final engagement in Alice (EC) and Lambani
(Lim), despite the previous success and team desire to do so. During last project meeting with
WRC, it was suggested additional funding could be made available specifically for this purpose.
Upon confirmation we will be glad to have the opportunity to close the project with successful
final workshop with stakeholders.
Project progress: on track
Deliverable 2
Progress: Tailored forecasts - Delivered and accepted by WRC.
Deliverable 3
Seasonal forecast and community report - Delivered and accepted by WRC.
Deliverable 4
Annual Report 2015/2016 - Delivered and accepted by WRC.
Deliverable 5
Progress: Uncertainties and errors, crop forecasting - Delivered and accepted by WRC.
Deliverable 6
Climate-Crop integration - Delivered and accepted by WRC.
Deliverable 7
Annual Report 2016/2017 - Delivered and accepted by WRC.
Deliverable 8
Progress: Tailored forecasts KZN 2 - Delivered and accepted by WRC.
Deliverable 9
Evaluation of climate-crop forecast benefits
Deliverable 10 (this document)
This report is a collection of work since the inception of the project, specific recent advancement
sections are highlighted in the (provisional) table of content below.
This report particularly integrate the advances of year 3 of the project. Year 3 was characterised
by formal engagements in Eastern Cape and Limpopo, preliminary results presentation and
analysis of feedbacks by various stakeholders, and early discussion of overall project lessons.
Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 5/12N.B. It is our intention that this document will eventually become our
final report, hence it gathers all work from the beginning of the project. In
order for the reviewers to focus on the last year advancement, we have
clarified in the table of content below, as well as on each paper’s first
page, a revision history which will point out new material.
The various sections of the report relate to the following aims of the project:
No. Aim Report Section
To rigorously document and improve accuracy and skill in, short
1 C5
(1-3 days) and medium (3-10 days) range weather forecasts.
To develop extended range (11 to 30 day) weather forecasts to
2 C5
facilitate fully seamless forecasting.
To render seasonal forecasts data available to crop models,
3 B1, B2 > B3
including the seasonal production at selected locations in SA.
To integrate seasonal forecasts into crop models for seasonal
4 production scenarios, including the seasonal production at selected B3, B4 > B5
locations in SA.
To enhance the spatial and temporal resolution of seasonal climate
5 C5
forecasts.
To demonstrate the feasibility and evaluate the benefits of the
6 climate-crop integrated approach virtually (models only with B2, B4, B5 > B6
historical data) and in real conditions, at selected locations in SA.
To improve understanding of, and possible reduction in,
7 hydrological forecast uncertainties and errors across different time C14
ranges.
To develop and evaluate tailored hydrological and crop forecast
8 products for application in decision-making across different time C1 - C4, C6 - C13
ranges in one or more case studies in KwaZulu-Natal.
To feedback enablers and barriers to climate and agriculture
9 A, B, C > D
experts to facilitate future climate-crop integration.
Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 6/12Report highlights
As a very early version of what will be the final report, this Annual Report, last before the final
report, is translating the continuous efforts to update earlier information collected, for instance
about Alice in Eastern Cape (Sec.B12), about crop models (Sec.B32), about seasonal forecasts
(Sec.C52), or about the calibration and validation of ACRU (Sec.C7).
More noticeable inputs saw the light in this report, for instance the calibration and use of
AquaCrop to simulate sugarcane in KZN (Sec.C9) and deeper experiments towards the
understanding of uncertainties and errors in agrohydrological forecasting (Sec.C141).
Other novel inserts that we would like to highlight arise from continued engagement through
another round of successful workshops with the University of Venda and the University of Fort
Hare for instance, which included farmers, extension officers, agricultural experts and graduate
students, directly or indirectly connected to this project. The story of those workshops is
related in sections B21 and B22.
As a result we are proud to bring forward
● on the one hand (1) the new and valuable inputs of students involved in the project, all
of them bringing a new piece of information improving farmers preparedness to climate
variability, and
● on the other hand (2) a preliminary evaluation of the climate crop forecasts presented
and discussed.
1. Local perspective and local improvement of
farmer’s preparedness
The recent advances in locally relevant locally driven ways to improve farmer’s preparedness to
climate variability, is linked to the progress of post-graduate students and their supervisors in
the local universities engaging with agriculture sector stakeholders.
For instance, it translated into
● the development of a soil moisture and adaptive capacity mapping in EC (Sec.B51)
● the documentation of rainfall indigenous forecasting indicators in EC (Sec.B52)
● the description of efforts made to share this group forecast information with extension
officers both in EC and LIM, and (Sec.B54)
● the definition and expiration of ecological and densification potential for smallholder the
farmers (Sec.B55)
Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 7/122. Preliminary assessment of climate-crop forecast
benefits through engagement
At the occasion of the last report (Deliverable 9), we are grateful the WRC project management
team pushed us further into the assessment of climate-crop forecast benefits for better
preparing farmers to climate variability. Although the section will still improve, it summarises
the information presented, how it was presented, and the feedbacks received in response. The
details of this analysis are reported in the section B61.
Despite a few expected challenges and the need to deliver the information with a minimum of
background to understand it, it was very well received and judged useful, while additional
directions were expressed, such as IK. This overwhelming positive reception makes us believe
we have developed a consistent and pertinent integration of crop and short-term climate
information that is judged actionable.
Capacity building and project outputs
It is our pleasure to continue to actively involve postgraduate students with highly relevant
research topics and working towards their Hons, MSc and PhD degree (see section E). We have
seen this year again, significant dissemination efforts of the project science advances in national
conferences and symposium.
We would like to particularly acknowledge (Sec.F)
● the first accepted paper lead by Martin doing his PhD at the University of Fort Hare,
● the first degree completed, Honours for Luleka at the University of Cape Town.
Administration Management
To date all but one sub-contracts in between UCT and its partners are completed. SAWS is the
only exception, mostly due to personnel movement in between institutions (UKZN, CSIR, SAWS)
and changes in initial agreements have been made, both in terms of tasks and finance.
partner drafted in partner’s invoiced
completed
institution and sent hand once at least
ARC
CSIR
SAWS
UFH
UKZN
UNIVEN
UP
Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 8/12(Provisional) Table of Content
SECTION A
BACKGROUND - TO BE REDUCED TO ONE SECTION IN FINAL REPORT
Section Paper title first update last update
A1 Rationale and aims 2015 2015
A2 Approach overview 2015 2015
A3 Stakeholder and case study locations 2015 2015
A4 Data: format, storage and access 2016 2016
SECTION B
A CASE STUDY IN APPLYING SEASONAL CLIMATE FORECASTS TO MANAGE
CLIMATE VARIABILITY AMONGST SMALL SCALE FARMERS
Section Paper title first update last update
B1 Sites description
B11 Lambani in Limpopo, South Africa 2016 2016
B12 Alice in Eastern Cape, South Africa 2016 2018
B2 Stakeholder engagement
B21 Lambani in Limpopo, South Africa 2017 2018
B22 Alice in Eastern Cape, South Africa 2017 2018
B3 Material and Methods
B31 Seasonal forecasts 2015 2017
B32 Crop models 2015 2018
B33 Linking seasonal forecasts and crop models 2017 2017
B4 Farms typologies
B41 Awareness and response to climate variability 2017 2017
B42 Identifying ecological intensification potential 2017 2017
B5 Improving farmer’s preparedness to climate variability
B51 Soil moisture and adaptive capacity mapping 2018 2018
Documenting rainfall indigenous forecasting
B52 2018 2018
indicators (EC)
Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 9/12Indigenous Approaches to Forecasting Rainfall
B53 on-going
(LIM)
B54 Sharing (crop) forecasts information 2018 2018
Assessing ecological intensification potential
B55 2018 2018
for smallholder farmers
B6 Discussion and conclusion
Evaluation of climate-crop forecast benefits
B61 2018 2018
through engagements
B6X
SECTION C
A CASE STUDY IN APPLYING MEDIUM RANGE WEATHER FORECASTS AND
SEASONAL CLIMATE FORECASTS TO IMPROVE WATER AND CROP
MANAGEMENT IN SUGARCANE IN THE MHLATHUZE CATCHMENT
Section Paper Title first update last update
C1 Introduction 2017 2018
C2 Description of the Mhlatuze Catchment 2016 2018
C3 Description of the Empangeni Site 2016 2016
C4 Stakeholder engagement
Ascertaining the needs for agrohydrological
C41 2016 2016
forecasting
Obtaining information on crop and water
C42 2017 2017
resources management
C5 Refinement of weather and climate forecasts
C51 Weather Forecasts 2017 2017
C52 Seasonal Climate Forecasts 2018 2018
C6 Description of the ACRU model 2016 2016
C7 Configuration and verification of the ACRU model in the Mhlathuze catchment
C71 Configuration of ACRU 2016 2018
C72 Verification of ACRU 2017 2018
C8 Development of The ACRU agrohydrological forecasting tool
Review of hydrological and agricultural
C81 2017 2018
forecasting systems
Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 10/12C82 Overview of the planned ACRU forecasting tool 2017 2017
C83 Delft-FEWS hydrological forecasting framework 2017 2018
Integration of the ACRU model into the
C84 2018 2018
Delft-FEWS Forecasting system
Application of Delft-FEWS for agrohydrological
C85 2018 2018
forecasting in the Mhlatuze catchment
C9 Description of the AquaCrop Sugarcane Module 2018 2018
Configuration of AquaCrop at the Empangeni Site and
C10 2018 2018
Results of Historical Simulations
C11 Short to medium range agrohydrological forecasts NA
C12 Seasonal forecasts of the level of Goedetrouw Dam NA
Seasonal Forecasts of Crop Yield and Water
C13 Productivity at Empangeni NA
Efforts to understand and reduce uncertainties and errors in agrohydrological
C14
forecasting
Evaluation of medium range numerical weather
C141 prediction rainfall and temperature hindcasts 2018 2018
for agrohydrological forecasting
Reducing uncertainty and error in
C142 agrohydrological forecasting through improved 2017 2017
initialization of ACRU
Assessing improvements in agrohydrological
C143 forecasting when incorporating temperature 2017 2017
forecasts into the forecast methodology
C15 Discussion and conclusions NA
SECTION D
LEARNING RECOMMENDATIONS FROM MULTIPLE CASE STUDIES
MAYBE MORE A SUMMARY FOR POLICY MAKER KIND?
ALL KEY MESSAGES IN ONE PLACE?
Section Paper first update last update
D1 Sites NA
D2 Stakeholder engagement NA
D3 Forecasts and impacts models NA
Project#K5/2496/4 WRC annual report 2016-2017 page 11/12D4 Crop forecasts NA
D5 Perception and response of next users NA
D6 Barriers and enablers NA
D7 Lessons and recommendations NA
SECTION E
CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT
Section Paper Title first update last update
E1 Individuals 2016 2018
E2 Institutions 2015 2018
E3 Communities 2015 2018
SECTION F
PROJECT OUTPUTS
Section Paper Title first update last update
F1 Papers 2017 2018
F2 Conferences/Symposiums 2017 2018
F3 Workshops/meeting 2017 2018
F4 Dissertations and thesis 2018 2018
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