Attribution of harvesting events


Posted on June 25, 2018

To resolve potential double harvests within one year, crop yields should be reported per growing and not per calendar year. The unit of the time dimension of the NetCDF v4 output file is thus “growing seasons since YYYY-01-01 00:00:00”. Cumulative growing season variables as, e.g., actual evapotranspiration or precipitation are to be accumulated over the growing season. The first season in the file (with value time=1) is then the first complete growing season of the time period provided by the input data without any assumed spin-up data, which equates to the growing season with the first planting after this date. To ensure that data can be matched to individual years in post-processing, it is essential to also provide the actual planting dates (as day of the year), actual planting years (year), anthesis dates (as day of the year), year of anthesis (year), maturity dates (day of the year), and year of maturity (year). This procedure is identical to the GGCMI convention (Elliott et al. 2015: The Global Gridded Crop Model intercomparison: data and modeling protocols for Phase 1).