Spatio-temporal coupling of satellite and reanalysis hydro-meteorological signals for cocoa market volatility

Climate extremes increasingly disrupt the supply of agricultural commodities grown in concentrated geographic regions. Cocoa ( Theobroma cacao ) plants are particularly vulnerable, since Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana grow about 60% of the world’s supply. Climate precursors of agricultural price shocks are typically reported at country scales, while recent Earth observation (EO) products provide high-resolution cocoa classification maps at plantation scales. The latter provide an opportunity to sample hydro-meteorological variables over the cocoa growing area to investigate potential association with future market changes. During 2024, cocoa futures rose above US$12,000 per metric ton after 2 decades below US$3,800. Here we analyze weekly records of satellite and reanalysis precipitation, soil moisture and 2 m temperature and cocoa futures prices from 2000 to 2025. We identify change points with the Pettitt test and a block bootstrap that allows for autocorrelation, and we monitor an energy index from a lag-embedded principal component analysis fitted only on 2000 to 2017. The mapped footprint contracted by 3,757 km 2 (2.5%) between 2020 and 2024. Soil moisture shifted downward in December 2023, and temperature upward in July 2023, although the temperature shift loses significance once the warming trend is removed. The price entered a high-price regime in March 2024, and both climate shifts preceded it in 87% of bootstrap replicates. The energy index entered its most intense alert episode on 19 November 2023, 16 weeks before the high-price regime. It had raised three earlier episodes without a comparable price rise, and removing the warming trend of the calibration period shortened the lead to 5 weeks. Beyond the cocoa-masked overland area, the soil moisture shift was 26% smaller and the index alerted only after the high-price regime began. The findings indicate that climate records sampled over plantation-scale cocoa maps can provide physically grounded indicators of excessive heat and soil drying that may precede supply shocks. The methodology is reproducible and transferable to other geographically concentrated crop types and EO products.