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.
Highlights
The study region of this work is the La Plata Basin (LPB), which covers an area near 3,200,000 km2 (Figure 1)
The spatial and temporal distribution simulated by the Eta model is in agreement with patterns found in scientific literature and with observational data used in this study (Figure 2)
We evaluated the simulated present climate (1961-1990) and assessed the future climate change projections (2011-2099) generated by the Eta regional climate model, using a spatial resolution of 10 km with initial and boundary conditions from the Eta-20 km and HadGEM2-ES models, and RCP 4.5 emission scenario
Summary
The study region of this work is the La Plata Basin (LPB), which covers an area near 3,200,000 km (Figure 1). According to Marengo et al [1], a relatively small number of studies have been made on impacts and vulnerability in Brazil using projections of regional-scale climate change scenarios. They do not leave any margin for doubt: Brazil will not be spared by climate change [1]. According to Solman [9], various studies of South America have been made in recent years, which have demonstrated that regional-scale climate simulations are affected by various sources of uncertainty. One of these stems from the land-surface schemes. The analysis of changes in temperature and precipitation, relative to present climate, is done in three timeslices: 2011-2040, 2041-2070, and 2071-2099
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