Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project: Overview of Model Intercomparisons.

Improvement of crop simulation models to better estimate growth and yield is one of the objectives of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP). The overall goal of AgMIP is to provide an assessment of crop model through rigorous intercomparisons and evaluate future climate change assessments at global and regional scales through the participation of multiple crop and global agricultural modeling groups around the world. The goals are to improve substantially the characterization of world food security and risk of hunger including the effects of climate change, as well as to build a framework for continuing agricultural assessment and for identifying adaptation and mitigation strategies to aid policymaking across a range of scales. One of the initial steps to achieve the AgMIP goal is to compare model performance for different crops using data sets assembled from the world community.  Intercomparison efforts are underway for wheat and maize and being assembled for sugarcane, rice, soybean, potato, soghum/millet, and peanut. These intercomparisons are being conducted by each crop modeling group using soil, weather, and plant data assembled from sites around the world which represent a range of soil and weather conditions and productivity levels. Intercomparisons are made using a variety of different methods to evaluate model performance.