This project takes an agriculturally focused approach to assessing the skill of seasonal climate forecasting systems and their value for aiding on-farm decision making. It makes use of AgScore - an innovative software tool that provides robust comparisons of seasonal climate models using agriculturally relevant metrics. AgScore is a cloud-based tool which executes APSIM (the Agricultural Production Systems sIMulator) with uploaded climate model data and analyses the results against identical APSIM simulations using baseline climatology for the same period to identify biases and weaknesses in climate models for predicting agriculturally relevant metrics such as crop yield.

This approach will be applied to a selection of global climate models and different Australian agricultural industries with the results communicated at different levels to growers, advisors, extension specialists in climate risk management and the broader climate science community. The project will also model the economic value of using seasonal forecast information to aid strategic on-farm decisions such as crop choice prior to sowing in different circumstances.