Conclusions from the Decadal Projections Performance Report

Facing climate change and climate variability is one of the main challenges in viticulture. Developing strategic actions to adapt viticulture to the impacts of a warmer climate is one of the main interests of the sector, which has been suffering for changes in the quality and yield.

A report has recently been published by VISCA project ‘Decadal projection performance report (D2.5)’ which provides a set of regional climate projections at European scale and at demosites of the project (Campania region, Mirabella Eclano Estate (Mastroberardino-Italy), Costers del Segre region, Raimat hills (Codorniu- Spain),  Douro Valley, Porto (Symington-Portugal)). These projections would bring an added value for the wine industry to plan long-term adaptation strategies to face climate change and a new climate variability in the coming decades.

First of all, EURO-CORDEX climate projections have been analysed in terms of their ability to reproduce the historical climate. As a result, it has been confirmed that EURO-CORDEX is representing correctly the temporal and spatial correlation of the main interesting variables such as mean temperature and precipitation, climate extremes such as droughts, spring frosts and heatwaves and, finally, specific agronomical parameters such the Winkler index.

After that, the analysis of climate projections at European scale and at demosites is providing by comparing the climatology off the period 2070-2099 against the historical period 1976-2005. In terms of precipitation, a decrease in the southern European countries, which is more intense in the summer months. In terms of temperature, there is a clear increase throughout Europe, although it is more intense in southern countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and in norther countries like Sweden and Finland. Regarding extreme events, there is an increase of the length of droughts, especially in the Iberian Peninsula, a decrease of frost days in spring months and an increase of heatwaves, especially in the southern European countries.

VISCA DSS is integrating climate and agricultural models with farmers’ management specifications in order to design short practices, medium- and long-term adaptation strategies to climate change.

This April, VISCA DSS is predicting lower temperature events in Costers del Segre in the southwest slope of Raimat hills, where our Spanish demonstration site is located. This fall in temperature would lead to Spring Frost event causing some loss of shoots after budbreak. To avoid this loss, the activation of frost protection protocols was set on, a week in advance, on 26^th March 2020. This information was obtained via the weather information widget of the DSS, and precisely the short & mid-term forecasts.

In order to reduce this effect, preventive irrigation was applied to the vineyards in this site.

VISCA project has published recently 3 new public deliverables related to the analysis of climate projections at the European scale and particularly at the demosites of the project, report on a full year application of the CS-DSS and VISCA booklet presenting preliminary results.

You may download them below:

• VISCA_Deliverable 2.5: Decadal projection performance report
• VISCA_Deliverable 4.8: Second preliminary report between research teams (WP2), DSS developers and end-users on a full year application of the CS-DSS
• VISCA_Deliverable 5.5: Booklet on VISCA results (Draft)