Impact of climate change on the wheat crop calendar under RCP2.6 scenario (Case study: South of Khuzestan Province)

The purpose of this study is detection of climate change trend in 3 selected stations namely Abadan, Ahvaz and Dezful in the south of Khuzestan province,Iran during the baseline period of (1980-2010) and investigation the possible effect of climate change on the wheat crop calendar in Dezful region based on the RCP 2.6 scenario. The future projected climatic data with temporal resoulution of 5 mintues were retrived from CCAFS and WorldClim1.4 climate databases and downscaled using SDSM weather generator, till 2040. The precipitation, minimum and maximum temperature variables maps were produced by ArcGis10.4 software using the IDW . The possible effect of climate change on growing season length in Dezful station was assesed.The results showed that, on average,the beginning of all phenological stages from planting to harvest would occur about 15 days earlier by the end of future period.This sift for the heading phase is projected to be 8 to 10 days. For the physiological maturity stage, a different trend was observed, so that during near future period, i.e., 2021 to 2031, the maturity stage will occur between April 11th to April 22nd,but during 2031 to 2041, the date of maturity varies between 21 March to 11 th April. In other words, It is projected that by the middle of the century, the wheat crop maturity would happen sooner between 10 and 15 days in the study station.