Integration of satellite remote sensing and crop modelling for improved assessment of climate change impacts on crop yields in Sweden

The recent drought event in 2018 caused large reduction in food production in Northern Europe including Sweden. Global climate change is expected to increase extreme events, posing great threat to food security and sustainable social-economic development. Process-based crop growth models are important tools to predict crop yields under different climate scenarios, but they are often limited by insufficient representation of internal key physical and biological processes of vegetation and thus their predictions contain large uncertainty. Satellite Earth observations have been successfully used to provide spatial information on vegetation-related variables (e.g. vegetation phenology, evapotranspiration and crop yields) that can be used to constrain crop growth models. This project will work on integrating satellite earth observations and a crop growth model for improved assessment of climate change impacts on crop yields in Sweden.