DTR in Winter Wheat Growing Regions of China: CMIP6 Models Evaluation and Comparation

Abstract

\n Winter wheat is widely planted in China. The changes of winter wheat yield and quality are related to the food security of human society. Climate change has an important impact on the yield and quality of winter wheat. Diurnal temperature range (DTR) is an important factor affecting the yield and protein content of winter wheat. Furthermore, climate model is one of the main sources of error in crop model simulations of yields. Therefore, how to improve the accuracy of climate data has become an important concern for scholars.Previous model evaluations for the entire country or region cannot answer which model is suitable for the estimation of future winter wheat yield. Therefore, we evaluated the ability of climate models to simulate DTR within the range of winter wheat growing regions in China to identify the most suitable climate models for winter wheat yield and quality projections. The results show that CMIP6 models can basically reproduce the DTR of winter wheat-growing regions in China, but there are discrepancies in the simulations between nationwide and winter wheat-growing regions. EC-Earth3-Veg has the best simulation of climate DTR for wheat-growing regions (TS=0.848) and nationwide (TS=0.842), and ACCESS-CM2 has the strongest ability to simulate the annual growing season DTR (TS=0.46). In summary, in the estimation of future winter wheat yield, attention should be given to the selection of models suitable for the actual growing regions and the growing seasons of winter wheat.