Workshop on Predictability, dynamics and applications research using the TIGGE and S2S ensembles

Weather and Climate information lies at the heart of managing agriculture. Decisions that need to be made on farm are wide-ranging from hourly spraying conditions to longer term crop choices or stocking management. Beyond the farm gate weather and climate influence shipping strategies and supply chains, insurance premiums and commodity markets. Australia’s CSIRO has invested in a Future Science Platform known as Digiscape to build the infrastructure common to all these applications. While each domain has specific needs, they all require a bank of weather and climate data that can be manipulated easily and fed to appropriate agronomy models. Here we discuss the value in taking a one-platform approach to delivering actionable knowledge to many different agricultural applications, and the value that can bring. One focus is combining sub-seasonal to seasonal climate forecasts with sensor data for a model-data fusion approach to agricultural forecasting. Examples are given for generating crop yield estimates for farmers and shipping handlers, irrigation decision tools, pasture prediction, and tactical bespoke data feeds for smaller horticultural industries.