Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-15-2014

Abstract

The Eurasian wheat belt (EWB) spans a region across Eastern Ukraine, Southern Russia, and Northern Kazakhstan; accounting for nearly 15% of global wheat production. We assessed land surface conditions across the EWB during the early growing season (April–May–June; AMJ) leading up to the 2010 Russian heat wave, and over a longer-term period from 2000 to 2010. A substantial reduction in early season values of the normalized difference vegetation index occurred prior to the Russian heat wave, continuing a decadal decline in early season primary production in the region. In 2010, an anomalously cold winter followed by an abrupt shift to a warmer-than-normal early growing season was consistent with a persistently negative phase of the North Atlantic oscillation (NAO). Regression analyses showed that early season vegetation productivity in the EWB is a function of both the winter (December–January–February; DJF) and AMJ phases of the NAO. Land surface anomalies preceding the heat wave were thus consistent with highly negative values of both the DJF NAO and AMJ NAO in 2010.

Publication Title

Environmental Research Letters

Volume

9

Issue

12

Pages

10

Type

text

Format

application/pdf

Language

en

DOI of Published Version

10.1088/1748-9326/9/12/124015

Publisher

IOP Publishing Ltd

Rights

© 2014 IOP Publishing Ltd

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Comments

This article was originally published in Environmental Research Letters 2014, 9:124015; doi:10.3390/w7094914. Posted with permission.

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