The warning classification scheme of ASAP – Anomaly hot Spots of Agricultural Production, v8.0

Agriculture monitoring, and in particular food security, requires near real time information on crop growing conditions for early detection of possible production deficits. Anomaly maps and time profiles of remote sensing derived indicators related to crops and rangelands conditions can be accessed online thanks to a rapidly growing number of web based portals. However, timely and systematic global analysis and coherent interpretation of such information, as it is needed for example for monitoring the United Nation Sustainable Development Goal 2 (Zero Hunger), remains challenging. With the ASAP system (Anomaly hot Spots of Agricultural Production) we propose a two-step analysis to provide timely warning of agricultural production deficits in water-limited agricultural systems worldwide every month. The first step is fully automated and aims at classifying each ASAP sub-national administrative unit (level 1 and 2, mostly corresponding to FAO Global Administrative Unit layer - GAUL 1 and 2 level, respectively) into a set of possible warning levels, ranging from “no warning” to “End-of-season biomass warning” (level 4). Warnings are triggered only during the crop growing season, as derived from a remote sensing based land surface phenology. The classification system takes into consideration the fraction of the agricultural land for each unit that is affected by a severe anomaly of soil water balance (measured through the Water Satisfaction Index, WSI), or precipitation deficit (measured through the Standardized Precipitation Index computed at the 3-month scale, SPI3), or vegetation biomass deficit (measured through a biophysical indicator of vegetation status, namely the anomaly of the cumulative value of the fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation from the start of the growing season, FPARc), and the timing during the growing cycle at which the anomalies occur. The level (i.e. severity) of the warning thus depends on: the timing, the nature and number of indicators for which an anomaly is detected, and the extent of the agricultural area affected. Maps and summary information are published in the Warning Explorer platform, available at https://agricultural-production-hotspots.ec.europa.eu/wexplorer/. The second step, not described in this technical report, involves the verification of the automatic warnings by agricultural analysts to identify the countries with potentially critical conditions at the national level that are marked as “hot spots” (https://agricultural-production-hotspots.ec.europa.eu/). This report focusses on the technical description of the automatic warning classification scheme version 8.0.0.

JRC.D.5 - Food Security