CROPWAVES

Humanity faces significant challenges regarding global food insecurity, and climate extremes aggravates this risk through their impact on crop failure. Understanding the climatic drivers of crop failure, monitoring crop growth, and implementing early warning systems is therefore of crucial importance. The recent surge in satellite-based crop products now creates a unique opportunity to improve global-scale crop and climate models at different spatial resolutions.

CropWaves is a collaborative research project funded by Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO) aimed to improve large-scale modelling of crop yield, implementing high-resolution early warning systems and assess climatic drivers of crop failures. This will be achieved by using a combination of satellite-based products for surface soil moisture and vegetation and two different models; a regional version of the AquaCrop model and the Community Earth System Model (CESM).

Within CropWaves we aim to contribute to food security for future generations, by providing useful tools and insights to assess agricultural systems under the pressure of a changing climate and growing population.

Link to project webpages:

CTSM (development)

https://github.com/ShannonRoos/CTSM_HS

https://github.com/ShannonRoos/ctsm_processing_python

AquaCrop

https://ees.kuleuven.be/en/aquacrop, https://github.com/KUL-RSDA/AquaCrop

Papers in preparation or in review:

 i.      Busschaert, L., Deketelaere, V., Thiery, W., Raes, D., De Lannoy, G.J.M. (2025). Future projections of European maize yields using AquaCrop with an adaptive growing season. European Journal of Agronomy, in review. 

ii.      De Lannoy, G., Busschaert, L., Bechtold, M., Lanfranco, N., de Roos, S., Heyvaert, Z., Mortelmans, J., Scherrer, S., Van den Bossche, M., Kumar, S., Mocko, D., Kemp, E., Heng, L., Steduto, P., Raes, D. (2025). Advancing Crop Modeling and Data Assimilation Using AquaCrop v7.2 in NASA’s Land Information System Framework v7.5. Geoscientific Model Development, https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2025/egusphere-2025-4417/

iii.    de Roos, S., Bechtold, M., Busschaert, L., Lievens, H., & De Lannoy, G. J. (2024). Assimilation of Sentinel‐1 backscatter to update AquaCrop estimates of soil moisture and crop biomass. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 129(10), e2024JG008231. https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JG008231