Role of Surface Melt and Icing Events in Livestock Mortality across Mongolia’s Semi-Arid Landscape

Abstract

Livestock production is a socioeconomic linchpin in Mongolia and is affected by large-scale livestock die-offs. Colloquially known as dzuds, these die-offs are driven by anomalous climatic events, including extreme cold temperatures, extended snow cover duration (SCD) and drought. As average temperatures across Mongolia have increased at roughly twice the global rate, we hypothesized that increasing cold season surface melt including soil freeze/thaw (FT), snowmelt, and icing events associated with regional warming have become increasingly important drivers of dzud events as they can reduce pasture productivity and inhibit access to grazing. Here, we use daily brightness temperature (T b ) observations to identify anomalous surface melt and icing events across Mongolia from 2003-2016 and their contribution to dzuds relative to other climatic drivers, including winter temperatures, SCD, and drought. We find a positive relationship between surface melt and icing events and livestock mortality during the fall in southern Mongolia and during the spring in the central and western regions. Further, anomalous seasonal surface melt and icing events explain 17-34% of the total variance in annual livestock mortality, with cold temperatures as the leading contributor of dzuds (20-37%). Summer drought showed the greatest explanatory power (43%) but overall had less statistically significant relationships relative to winter temperatures. Our results indicate that surface melt and icing events will become an increasingly important driver of dzuds as annual temperatures and livestock populations are projected to increase in Mongolia.

Impacts of climate change on the livestock food supply chain; a review of the evidence

“…The arrangement of climate extreme sequences such as drought sequences or number of hot days in a row, could have significant implications for the livestock sector ( Stafford Smith and Foran, 1992 ). While less commonly researched than droughts, other hazards such as fires, heavy storms, flooding events, surface melt and icing events, as well as the appearance of new lakes, streams and marshes also disturb crop growth, reduce arable land and restrict animal access to pastures ( Amstislavski et al, 2013 ; Pan et al, 2019 ). For instance, in northern Russia, nomadic reindeer herders migrate hundreds of kilometres in spring and autumn to connect summer and winter pastures.…”

A Long-Term Passive Microwave Snowoff Record for the Alaska Region 1988–2016

“…These results are consistent with the coarser footprint PMW Tb retrievals being more constrained in their ability to characterize sub-grid scale SO heterogeneity in complex landscapes relative to the finer scale optical remote sensing observations. Nevertheless, the Tb product used for this study [42,65] provides a 2-4-fold spatial resolution enhancement over other available standard PMW products for the same Tb frequencies [26,57,66], while preserving the benefit of near daily Tb temporal fidelity.…”

Extreme Climate Event and Its Impact on Landscape Resilience in Gobi Region of Mongolia

“…The summer season shows the biggest gain in temperature, while the gain during autumn is quite low. Several studies have discovered an increase in Eurasian snow cover over the past decades [54,55] and increasing trends in anomalous fall melt events [56] through remote sensing. Most stations during the last 15 years (2000-2014) are statistically drier than the previous 15 years (1985-1999).…”

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