Climate change indicators software for computing climate change indices for agriculture

Abstract

Climatic anomalies affect agricultural production, so the identification of climate change at the local level is a pressing task. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has generated indices that allow the identification of extreme climate events. Recent studies of weather and climate variation have increasingly used the climate extreme indices defined by the IPCC. This article dwells upon the ICC (climate change indicators) software written in the Java language which is a convenient tool for storing and processing large sets of daily weather data. The software allows the calculation of 27 climate change indices and four indices for growing vines. Built-in analytical tools help identify trends and climate anomalies on different time intervals. The application is additionally supplied with important functionality for statistical data processing and visualization. Tools that help analyzing climate change can foster wiser strategic decision-making in the management of agriculture and ecosystems.