Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 103 (2000) 1–2
Foreword
Special Issue of Agricultural and Forest Meteorol-ogy: Papers presented at the International Workshop on Agrometeorology in the 21st Century: Needs and Perspectives, 15–17 February 1999, Accra, Ghana.
We are delighted to introduce this Special Issue, which is based on the International Workshop on Agrometeorology in the 21st Century: Needs and Per-spectives held in Accra, Ghana, from 15 to 17 Febru-ary 1999. The workshop was organized in conjunction with the 12th Session of the Commission for Agricul-tural Meteorology (CAgM) of the World Meteorolog-ical Organization (WMO) that took place at the same venue from 18 to 26 February 1999. This was the first time over the past 48 years that a workshop of this nature was held followed by a session of CAgM. It provided an excellent opportunity for the 98 partici-pants from 55 countries from all the continents of the world to discuss a wide range of issues facing agrom-eteorology in the 21st century. We convey our sincere thanks to Prof. G.O.P. Obasi, Secretary-General and Dr. Mike Coughlan, Director of the World Climate Programme of WMO for their encouragement and support in the organization of this workshop.
The decision to organize such a workshop at this point in time is largely due to a number of significant developments that the scientific community has seen in this decade and these were highlighted by Prof. G.O.P. Obasi in the preface. To address the major is-sues facing agrometeorology in the 21st Century, ex-perts in several fields were invited to prepare discus-sion papers. The Workshop programme was designed in such a way as to engage all the participants in dis-cussions on each of these papers and develop appropri-ate recommendations for all organizations involved in agrometeorological research and applications, in par-ticular the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services.
After the workshop a one page information leaflet ‘Agrometeorology in the Service of Agriculture in the New Millennium’ was issued from which we quote:
“The participants at the workshop concluded that agrometeorologists are now able to take new initia-tives to strengthen services for agricultural production. These initiatives include a range of support systems for these services to be elaborated and implemented in collaboration with specialists in agriculture, forestry, fisheries and livestock production. These support sys-tems will include:
• Provision of good quality weather, climate, remotely-sensed and agricultural data for on-farm strategic and tactical decisions.
• Research on topics such as making more efficient use of climate and soil resources, improving ap-plications of seasonal climate prediction and ways to alleviate the devastating impacts of extreme events such as droughts, floods and high tempera-tures. Better early-warning systems should also be developed.
• Introduction of policies such as a framework for agrometeorologists to adapt agricultural production systems to climate variability and change, and to the increasing scarcity of water.
• Effective training, education and extension, in par-ticular for developing countries on all aspects of agricultural meteorology.”
We had organized the workshop sessions along the following headings. The papers falling under each heading are given in parenthesis.
1. Agrometeorology in the 21st Century: the objec-tives of agrometeorology in the past, the present and the next 20 years, international perspectives and the target groups of beneficiaries (Mon-teith; Sivakumar; Gommes and Baier; Rijks and Baradas).
2 Foreword / Agricultural and Forest Meteorology 103 (2000) 1–2
2. Agrometeorological aspects of agriculture and forestry: the structure of the agriculture and forestry to which agrometeorological applications are directed (De Pauw; Goebel and Adam; Jagtap and Ah Kee Chan; Strand).
3. Agrometeorological applications: some of the fields in which applications can be implemented with the knowledge now available (Smith; Kapet-sky; Hoogenboom and Hammer; Ogallo, Boulahya and Keane; and Salinger, Stigter and Das). 4. Data Collection, management and analysis:
devel-opments in traditional data collection methods, use of new techniques such as GIS and remote sensing (Doraiswamy, Pasteris, Jones, Motha and Nejedlik; and Maracchi, Pérarnaud and Kleschenko). 5. Communication of agrometeorological
informa-tion: new techniques and better use of traditional techniques (Weiss, Van Crowder and Bernardi) 6. Education and training in agrometeorology
(Lomas, Milford and Mukhala).
7. Summary and recommendations on needs and perspectives: implications for agrometeorological services and their support systems in the coming years (Stigter, Sivakumar and Rijks).
Papers by the invited experts which are presented in this issue as well as the contributions by the partic-ipants in the workshop helped us address the issues of needs and perspectives for agrometeorology in the 21st century in the final paper in this issue on ‘Summary and Recommendations of the Workshop on Needs and Perspectives’. It should be cautioned that the recom-mendations listed reflect the considered opinions of
the authors and the participants at the workshop and we are aware that these recommendations do not take care of the totality of the needs. We hope that this will encourage others to suggest further ways in which the science and applications of agricultural meteorology could be promoted.
As Guest Editors of this Special Issue, we would like to thank all the authors and the reviewers for their efforts. Many of the reviewers were most willing to meet the deadline we imposed and provided very use-ful and incisive reviews, which contributed greatly to the quality of the papers. We are indeed very much in-debted to Dr. Kya Thaw Paw U, the Editor-in-Chief of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, and Dr. Jacques Kiebert of Elsevier for their continuous support and suggestions leading to the preparation of this Special Issue.
M.V.K. Sivakumar∗
Agricultural Meteorology Division, World Meteorological Organization, 7bis Avenue de la Paix, CP 2300, CH 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland
C.J. Stigter TTMI-Project, Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University, Duivendaal 2, NL-6701 AP Wageningen, The Netherlands
D. Rijks Agrometeorological Applications Associates, P.O. Box 102, F-01213 Ferney-Voltaire Cedex, France
