Abstract
Against the background of global warming, extreme agrometeorological events have become more intense and frequent during the growing season of maize (Zea mays L.). In this study, we focused on the five types of extreme agrometeorological events that greatly affect maize production in Northeast China, including chilling injury, drought, rainstorm, frost, and gale. We averaged the actual timing of phenological events from the study agrometeorological stations and divided the maize growing season into four growth stages: emergence—jointing, jointing—flowering, flowering—kernel milk, and kernel milk—physiological maturity. Based on the historical weather data from 1960 to 2017 in the study region, we derived the values of pertinent indices for the five types of study extreme agrometeorological events during the four selected maize growth stages. The results showed that chilling injury and drought were relatively more frequent during the four growth stages of maize from 1960 to 2017 in the Northeast China. As time goes on during the growing season of maize, the spatial coverage of chilling injury, frost, and gale all showed a decreasing trend. By contrast, the spatial coverage of drought showed an increasing trend during the study growth stages of maize. During growth stages of maize, chilling injury was the main extreme agrometeorological event before the 2000s, while drought became the main extreme agrometeorological event after the 2000s. Identifying the main extreme climate events that could cause yield loss is imperative, and it is important for farmers to acknowledge ongoing changes in these extreme climate events in order to take preventive measures if necessary.
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Data availability
All data in this study are from the China Meteorological Administration (http://cdc.cma.gov.cn/).
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Acknowledgements
The authors appreciate the editor and reviewers for their valuable suggestions and questions to improve the quality of the manuscript.
Code availability
We wrote all the original programs with R language for the analysis in this work, and we are willing to share them upon request.
Funding
This work is supported by the National Key Research and Development of China (Grant no. 2017YFD0300301) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 31471408).
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Conceptualization: Fangliang Zhang, Xiaoguang Yang, and Zhijuan Liu. Methodology: Fangliang Zhang, Shuang Sun, and Xiaoguang Yang. Investigation: Jiqing Gao, Zhentao Zhang, and Tao Liu. Data curation, funding acquisition, and supervision: Xiaoguang Yang. Software and writing—original draft preparation: Fangliang Zhang. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Zhang, F., Yang, X., Sun, S. et al. A spatiotemporal analysis of extreme agrometeorological events during selected growth stages of maize (Zea mays L.) from 1960 to 2017 in Northeast China. Theor Appl Climatol 143, 943–955 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03465-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-020-03465-0