Abstract
Warming trends during winter seasons in East Asian regions are expected to accelerate in the future according to the climate projection by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Warmer winters may affect short-term cold hardiness of deciduous fruit trees, and yet phenological observations are scant compared to long-term climate records in the regions. Dormancy depth, which can be estimated by daily temperature, is expected to serve as a reasonable proxy for physiological tolerance of flowering buds to low temperature in winter. In order to delineate the geographical pattern of short-term cold hardiness in grapevines, a selected dormancy depth model was parameterized for "Campbell Early", the major cultivar in South Korea. Gridded data sets of daily maximum and minimum temperature with a 270m cell spacing ("High Definition Digital Temperature Map", HDDTM) were prepared for the current climatological normal year (1971-2000) based on observations at the 56 Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) stations and a geospatial interpolation scheme for correcting land surface effects (e.g., land use, topography, and site elevation). To generate relevant datasets for climatological normal years in the future, we combined a 25km-resolution, 2011-2100 temperature projection dataset covering South Korea (under the auspices of the IPCC-SRES A2 scenario) with the 1971-2000 HD-DTM. The dormancy depth model was run with the gridded datasets to estimate geographical pattern of change in the cold-hardiness period (the number of days between endo- and forced dormancy release) across South Korea for the normal years (1971-2000, 2011-2040, 2041-2070, and 2071-2100). Results showed that the cold-hardiness zone with 60 days or longer cold-tolerant period would diminish from 58% of the total land area of South Korea in 1971-2000 to 40% in 2011-2040, 14% in 2041-2070, and less than 3% in 2071-2100. This method can be applied to other deciduous fruit trees for delineating geographical shift of cold-hardiness zone under the projected climate change in the future, thereby providing valuable information for adaptation strategy in fruit industry.
