Predicting potential epidemics of rice diseases in Korea using multi-model ensembles for assessment of climate change impacts with uncertainty information

Kwang-Hyung Kim () and Jaepil Cho

Climatic Change, 2016, vol. 134, issue 1, 327-339

Abstract: It is highly anticipated that meteorological changes resulting from global climate change will affect the pattern of rice disease epidemics worldwide. Here, we evaluated the potential impacts of climate change on two representative rice diseases, leaf blast and sheath blight, in Korea. This study involves analyses of disease simulation using an epidemiological model, EPIRICE, which was validated for Korean rice paddy fields. The goal of our study was to assess likely changes in national disease probabilities using individual climate scenarios across different models and multi-model ensemble scenarios constructed by running 11 global climate models. In this way, the results from this study emphasize the uncertainties in climate change scenarios resulting from the variations in initial conditions as well as the structural differences in the global climate models. Observed and simulated epidemics for both diseases were compared using the area under the disease progress curve from EPIRICE model runs. Overall, the simulated incidence of epidemics for both diseases gradually decreased towards 2100 both from individual global climate models and multi-model ensembles. It was noted that while each individual model resulted in different magnitudes of impact, the multi-model ensemble gave the most reliable result that accounts for uncertainty compared to the individual models. In conclusion, we found that in modeling climate impacts on rice diseases, ensembles account for uncertainty better than individual climate models and can lead to better decision making. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-015-1503-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:134:y:2016:i:1:p:327-339

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-015-1503-2

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().