Southwest China

The ongoing season covers the harvest of winter wheat and rapeseed, as well as the planting and early growing of summer maize and semi-late rice. Crops showed mostly average condition throughout the monitoring period. The NDVI profile was below average in April, recovered to average and above average from May to June, but dropped again to below average in July due to the sustainable cloudy and rainy weather. All agroclimatic indicators for the region were average: RAIN +3%, TEMP -0.7°C, RADPAR -1%, and BIOMSS -2%. The Cropped Arable Land Fraction was unchanged from 2016, while VCIx was just fair, indicating average conditions as well. Southwestern Guizhou, northeastern Yunnan, and northwestern Guangxi appear to show a below-average crop condition from May to July, according to the NDVI clusters. In eastern Sichuan, below average condition lasted for the whole monitoring period, with VCIx in the range of 0.5-0.8. CropWatch will monitor the region closely over the coming months.

Figure 4.11a. Southwest China crop condition development graph based on NDVI, comparing the April-July 2017 period to the previous season and the five-year average (5YA) and maximum

Figure 4.11b. Southwest China spatial NDVI patterns for April to July 2017 (compared to the (5YA) (left) and (c) NDVI profiles associated with these spatial patterns (right)

Figure 4.11d. Southwest China Yangtze maximum VCI, April-July 2017

Figure 4.11e. Southwest China biomass, April-July 2017