You're welcome. My guess was simply based on my assumption that global area queries can never be changed in Production unless stored in a temporary package ($TMP).
Taking forward the same rationale, the inconsistencies between the query in Dev & Production would most likely be a result of playing around with the query in Dev, rather than it being changed in Production.
There is a lot of documentation about transporting queries, which I haven't explored so far. My suggestion is, if you can easily identify the differences between Dev & Prod, you could simply replicate the changes in Dev. Assuming, of course, it is only the question of changing selection or output fields. After this is done, you can add the new field and transport the changes to Prod.
However, if the differences between Dev & Prod are not easily identifiable/correctable, we'd have to adopt the (more tedious) approach of transporting the query from Prod to Dev first.
Let me know what the case is.