Agro-meteorological index insurance can transfer the risks in the agricultural production, reduce the farmers' economic losses, and promote a sustainable development of agricultural production. However, traditional agricultural insurance with a single rate has the problems of the presence of adverse selection, the difficulty of determining premium rates and assessing the claims. As a new agricu...

Global warming has resulted in increasingly frequent and severe drought and/or precipitation events. Severe drought limits crop water availability and impacts agricultural productivity and socioeconomic development. To quantify drought-induced yield loss during the main crop stages in Liaoning province, China, aspects of drought episodes (magnitude, duration, and frequency) were investigated du...

Drought affects virtually all regions of the world and results in significant economic, social and environmental impacts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates annual drought-related losses in the United States at $6-8 billion, which is more than any other natural hazard. Congress enacted the Agricultural Risk Protection Act of 2000 to encourage the United States Department of Agric...

Donald A. Wilhite and Kenneth G. Hubbard Center for Agricultural Meteorology and Climatology University of Nebraska Lincoln, Nebraska The ability to collect weather data in near-real time has improved because of technological advances, enabling weather data users to obtain more weather data over wider areas, and in a more timely fashion. The number of near-real time climate networks is increasi...

Drought events develop in both space and time and they are therefore best described through summary joint spatio-temporal characteristics, such as mean duration, mean affected area and total magnitude. This paper addresses the issue of future projections of such characteristics of drought events over France through three main research questions: (1) Are downscaled climate projections able to si...

With global climate change, rainfall is becoming more variable. Predicting the responses of species to changing rainfall levels is difficult because, for example in herbivorous species, these effects may be mediated indirectly through changes in host plant quality. Furthermore, species responses may result from a simultaneous interaction between rainfall levels and other environmental variables...

Droughts can be characterized by their severity, frequency and duration, and areal extent. Depth-area-duration analysis, widely used to characterize precipitation extremes, provides a basis for evaluation of drought severity when storm depth is replaced by an appropriate measure of drought severity. We used gridded precipitation and temperature data to force a physically-based macroscale hydrol...

This protocol describes a method by which a large collection of the leafy green vegetable lettuce (Lactuca sativa L.) germplasm was screened for likely drought-tolerance traits. Fresh water availability for agricultural use is a growing concern across the United States as well as many regions of the world. Short-term drought events along with regulatory intervention in the regulation of water a...

The aim of this paper is to investigate characteristics of meteorological and agricultural droughts and their trends in Iran, as well as several subregions with different climate conditions from 1980 to 2013. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Soil Moisture Index (SSI) are used as the primary indicators of meteorological and agricultural droughts, respectively. This stu...

Stress is defined as any soil and climatic conditions or combination of both that hinders the full realization of genetic potential of a plant, limiting their growth, development and reproduction. These effects in plants of agricultural interest have a major impact on productivity and quality and thus represent, together with biotic stress, the cause of the gap between yield potential and actua...