Climate Variability and Its Implications to Future Irrigation Requirement in Nebraska

Climate variability poses potential impacts on crop water management, especially in an agricultural state like Nebraska. Mapping possible scenarios of future irrigation requirement is critical for water resource managers to understand the challenges that arise from climate variability.  In this paper, we adopted the latest IPCC 5th assessment report (AR5) climate datasets (e.g., precipitation, potential evapotranspiration) produced from a range of general circulation models and a general water balance model to generate different scenarios of irrigation requirement. The mapped "best" and "worst" scenarios can provide water resource planners with perspectives of the range of variation due to climate to develop corresponding strategies to cope with these challenges.