Meteorological data and farmers’ perception of coastal climate in Bangladesh

This study compares the scientifically observed spatiotemporal climate variability with farmer perceptions. A survey of 381 farmers and ten focus group discussions (FGDs) were used to collect data from ten coastal subdistricts. We hypothesized that any gap between farmer perceptions and meteorological data could be due to variations in their individual characteristics. An unsupervised clustering algorithm was used to categorise the farmers into good and poor perception clusters to test the hypothesis. The climatic data showed a low (0.45 °C) spatial difference of the mean temperature (1988-2017) among the visited locations. Annual rainfall variations between the western and eastern coastal areas could be more than 100 cm, making the eastern coasts wetter. The FGD outputs were mostly cognate with meteorological…