The validation of climate in the wine-growing region of the Western Cape of South Africa

Abstract

The Western Cape province, home to the majority of South Africa’s viniculture, is highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. This study validates the Co-ordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) temperature and precipitation outputs along with their vinicultural bioclimatic indices over the Western Cape for the historic period (1980–2000) as the first step to determining the ability of the models to accurately simulate future conditions. From the results, we observed that the output had a high agreement with observational data in the case of reproducing monthly average temperatures while precipitation outputs show high variability with moderate to high agreement. The performance of the models in simulating the vinicultural indices greatly depends on location with some models performing better than others. The results of this study will contribute to current efforts to understand the dynamics of climate change and viniculture in the Western Cape, where extreme events associated with climate change are already affecting farmers and potentially impacting the industry’s production and quality.