Trends in agro-climate variables in Slovenia

Abstract

Agriculture crucially depends on climate conditions. It has a significant role in mitigating climate change but it also has to adopt certain adaptation measures in order to preserve sustainability. Development of adaptation measures is based on knowledge about agro-meteorological variables. The purpose of this work is therefore to assess changes of most important agro-meteorological variables over Slovenia. These variables include temperature, precipitation, number of hot, warm and cold days, evapotranspiration, precipitation amount and other indices. For the calculation purposes we divided time series of meteorological variables into comparison period (1991 - 2007) which was compared to the base period (1961 - 1990). Average annual temperature has risen for about 0.7 °C to 1.4 °C, the rise in maximum temperature is even more pronounced. The number of hot days has increased whereas the number of cold days has decreased. Precipitation has decreased in winter and increased in autumn, changes in spring and summer exhibit spatial dependency and are in general lower. Summer evapotranspiration exhibits significant positive trend, which is most pronounced in south-eastern part of Slovenia (30 mm/10 years).