Quantitative projection of the probable impacts of climate change on date and damage risk of late spring frost during 21st century over Iran

The late spring frost (LSF), as one of the main climatic disasters, has significant negative impacts on agricultural and horticultural crops production. It is expected that the features of its occurrence will be altered by climate change and global warming. Hence, the present study was performed to quantify these changes under two scenarios of A2 and A1B using CGCM3 general circulation model outputs, downscaled by ANN technique. For this purpose, daily minimum temperature data of 50 weather stations for the period of 1961-2010, representing different climatic regions of Iran, were collected and quality-controlled. Trend analysis of the regional mean of annual minimum temperature showed a significant (p