Potential consequences of climate change on crop production can be studied using mechanistic crop simulation models. While a broad variety of maize simulation models exist, it is not known whether different models diverge on grain yield responses to changes in climatic factors, or whether they agree in their general trends related to phenology, growth, and yield. With the goal of analyzing the sensitivity of simulated yields to changes in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations [CO₂], we present the largest maize crop model intercomparison to date, including 23 different models. These models were evaluated for four locations representing a wide range of maize production conditions in the world: Lusignan (France), Ames (USA), Rio Verde (Brazil) and Morogoro (Tanzania). While individual models differed considerably in absolute yield simulation at the four sites, an ensemble of a minimum number of models was able to simulate absolute yields accurately at the four sites even with low data for calibration, thus suggesting that using an ensemble of models has merit. Temperature increase had strong negative influence on modeled yield response of roughly −0.5 Mg ha⁻¹ per °C. Doubling [CO₂] from 360 to 720 μmol mol⁻¹ increased grain yield by 7.5% on average across models and the sites. That would therefore make temperature the main factor altering maize yields at the end of this century. Furthermore, there was a large uncertainty in the yield response to [CO₂] among models. Model responses to temperature and [CO₂] did not differ whether models were simulated with low calibration information or, simulated with high level of calibration information.

Predicting rice (Oryza sativa) productivity under future climates is important for global food security. Ecophysiological crop models in combination with climate model outputs are commonly used in yield prediction, but uncertainties associated with crop models remain largely unquantified. We evaluated 13 rice models against multi‐year experimental yield data at four sites with diverse climatic conditions in Asia and examined whether different modeling approaches on major physiological processes attribute to the uncertainties of prediction to field measured yields and to the uncertainties of sensitivity to changes in temperature and CO₂ concentration [CO₂]. We also examined whether a use of an ensemble of crop models can reduce the uncertainties. Individual models did not consistently reproduce both experimental and regional yields well, and uncertainty was larger at the warmest and coolest sites. The variation in yield projections was larger among crop models than variation resulting from 16 global climate model‐based scenarios. However, the mean of predictions of all crop models reproduced experimental data, with an uncertainty of less than 10% of measured yields. Using an ensemble of eight models calibrated only for phenology or five models calibrated in detail resulted in the uncertainty equivalent to that of the measured yield in well‐controlled agronomic field experiments. Sensitivity analysis indicates the necessity to improve the accuracy in predicting both biomass and harvest index in response to increasing [CO₂] and temperature.