Modelling climate change induced phenological trends and frost risks in Belgian fruit orchards

Apples and pears represent an important share of Belgium’s horticultural production but the sector has been subjected to a range of challenging meteorological conditions over the past decade. The most disastrous event was the extraordinarily severe frost night happening during peak flowering of commercially grown apple cultivars, in April 2017. This research aims at investigating how meteorological hazards in Belgium will evolve in space and time with changing climate and at challenging the claim of the insurance sector that the hazards are spatially invariant. It features the assessment of the probability and severity of frosts during the flowering period throughout the 21st century, using a set of regional climate model realizations from the CORDEX ensemble. To this end, the apple and pear tree phenology is modelled using the strong relation between air temperature during winter/early spring and dormancy break and consequently flowering. Local observations since 1950 of the phenology of major cultivars ...