Abstract
This study shows climate projections of air temperature and precipitation over South America (SA) from the Regional Climate Model version 3 (RegCM3) nested in ECHAM5 and HadCM3 global models. The projections consider the A1B scenario from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and three time-slices: present (1960–1990), near- (2010–2040), and far-future (2070–2100) climates. In the future, RegCM3 projections indicate general warming throughout all SA and seasons, which is more pronounced in the far-future period. In this late period the RegCM3 projections indicate that the negative trend of precipitation over northern SA is also higher. In addition, a precipitation increase over southeastern SA is projected, mainly during summer and spring. The lifecycle of the South American monsoon (SAM) was also investigated in the present and future climates. In the near-future, the projections show a slight delay (one pentad) of the beginning of the rainy season, resulting in a small reduction of the SAM length. In the far-future, there is no agreement between projections related to the SAM features.
Highlights
Since the 1980s, scientific evidences have been published indicating changes in the global climate
The northern Argentina warm bias is a common problem of the RegCM previous versions [16, 31] and of other regional climate models (RCMs) [13] during summer; it disappears in winter (Figures 2(e)–2(h))
Two present climate simulations (1960– 1990) in South America (SA) carried out with Regional Climate Model version 3 (RegCM3) nested in Hadley Centre coupled model version 3 (HadCM3) and ECHAM5 outputs were validated
Summary
Since the 1980s, scientific evidences have been published indicating changes in the global climate. Many questions about how the climate in different regions of the globe will be in the future arise To this end, the IPCC defined several scenarios of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions to be used in numerical studies. For AR4, the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES, [3]) defined a set of six-group scenarios derived from four families: A1, A2, B1, and B2, with A2 being pessimistic scenario with higher GHG emissions. These scenarios have been used in many numerical studies of future climate with both global and regional climate models (RCMs)
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