Connecting Agriculture Stress Index Systems at the Sub-National Level to the Next Generation of Seasonal Climate Forecasts: A Case Study to Transition from Monitoring to Forecasting in Guatemala's Dry Corridor

Agriculture for food production remains a large component of the economies in several countries currently facing climate variability and change. Often, the agricultural landscapes in rural areas of these countries are dependent on precipitation for crop irrigation. In the face of climate variability and change, decision-making processes at both institutional and farm level are becoming more complex. An informed risk-management strategy in climate-vulnerable agricultural landscapes could benefit from anticipating the effects of a potential agricultural drought and its impacts on food production. Current efforts for monitoring vegetation stress in agricultural areas around the world have been successfully implemented at different scales and are used by leading global developmental and humanitarian agencies. Yet, these systems currently monitoring agricultural production could benefit from incorporating seasonal and sub-seasonal forecasts to transition from monitoring to forecasting agricultural droughts months in advance, which could inform risk-management strategies at both the farm and institutional level. The next generation of climate forecasts -hereinafter NextGen- developed by the meteorological institutes around the world has opened new avenues for state-of-the-art research and applied science that has the potential to transform policy-making processes in these territories and help local governments achieve their developmental goals. In this paper, we demonstrate the predictive skill of a MOS-processed multi-model ensemble derived from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) to forecast vegetation stress at a sub-country level in the dry corridor of Guatemala which is currently being implemented by the World Food Program (WFP) and the National Meteorological Institute of Guatemala (INSIVUMEH) for Anticipatory Action implementation before the effects of drought are felt in these vulnerable agricultural communities.