Downscaling Climate Projections over La Plata Basin

Caroline Mourão^1,2*, Sin Chan Chou¹, José Marengo²

¹National Institute for Space Research, Cachoeira Paulista, Brazil.
²National Center for Natural Disaster Monitoring and Early Warning, São José dos Campos, Brazil.

DOI: 10.4236/acs.2016.61001                

Abstract

Regional Climate Models are important tools, which are increasingly being used in studies of impacts and adaptation to climate change at local scale. The goal of this work is to assess the climate change over the La Plata Basin, using the Eta Regional model with a resolution of 10 km. Initial and boundary conditions used by the model are provided by the Eta-20 km model and the HadGEM2-ES Global model. The RCP 4.5 scenario was used for simulations of the future climate. The evaluation of the present climate (1961-1990) shows that the model represents well the spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation and temperature in the region. The model underestimates precipitation over large areas in summer, and overestimates in Southern Brazil in winter. Simulated temperature shows a good correlation with CRU data, with bias less than 1°C. The bias of temperature and precipitation in this simulation setup for the La Plata Basin is substantially reduced in comparison with previous literature using regional models. The climatic projections are shown in timeslices: 2011-2040, 2041-2070, and 2071-2099. In the three timeslices, the simulation project has a trend for an increase in precipitation during summer in Argentina, Uruguay, and southernmost Brazil. This increase is only projected in Southern Brazil during winter. The negative anomaly of precipitation appears in a large portion of the model domain during summer and is limited to some states in Southeast and Central-West Brazil in winter. The area with largest warming is projected in the northern portion of the domain. The projected increase in temperature reaches about 4°C in 2071-2099.

Keywords

Regional Climate Model, Climate Downscaling, Climate Change Assessment, La Plata Basin

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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