DROUGHT EVENTS, WATER AVAILABILITY IN SOYBEAN AND CORN PRODUCTION AND THEIR PRODUCTION POTENTIAL IN DIFFERENT CMIP6 CLIMATE SCENARIOS
Simulation models, drought indices, climate, meteorological variables
The state of Mato Grosso is the largest producer of soybeans and corn in Brazil, in addition to being a large agricultural center, it is recognized worldwide for its biodiversity, sheltering within its geographic limits the biomes, Amazon, Cerrado and Pantanal. Climate is the main conditioner of agricultural systems, however, climate change is already considered a global problem, changes in negative influences, as well as greater occurrence of droughts, will be responsible for causing irreversible damage to agriculture and human life. This work aims to evaluate the effects of climate change on soybean and corn productivity, using DSSAT for crop simulation, in addition, to characterize the main drought events for different regions of Mato Grosso. For the simulation of soybean productivity in DSSAT, data were acquired in experiments carried out in the 2015/2016 harvests, for three cultivars. The climate variations used refer to the NASA Earth Exchange Downscaled Global Daily Projections (NEX-GDDP), obtained from the General Circulation Model (GCM) runs, for RCPs 4.5 and 8.5, in the period from 2030 to 2060, for the MIROC6 model. The productivity simulation was carried out in six different semester periods. To characterize the droughts, the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) were used on 6- and 12-month scales. The climate data were acquired by executing a script in Code Editor on Google Earth Engine, corresponding to a time series from 1982 to 2023 of the ERA5-Land reanalysis. Corn productivity was evaluated in an experiment carried out in the field in the 2022/2023 harvest, as a function of different doses of nitrogen and potassium, in two environments, with and without selective application. The results indicate an increase in soybean productivity for future scenarios due to the cultivar's greater assimilation of CO2. However, rainfall instability and high temperatures are responsible for the decline in production in the region. The drought characterization indexes are a fluctuation between wet and dry periods until the beginning of the 21st century. In recent years, a greater accentuation of dry periods has been observed in all regions, for both indexes. Corn presented different results depending on the environments and coverage doses. In general, the crop presents better results when grown in ideal water conditions. However, in the system without transparency, detailed results were also collected, thus confirming that, despite the possible water deficiency, the cultivars can develop and obtain desirable results.