Abstract
Spatial assessments of historical climate change provide information that can be used by scientists to analyze climate variation over time and evaluate, for example, its effects on biodiversity, in order to focus their research and conservation efforts. Despite the fact that there are global climatic databases available at high spatial resolution, they represent a short temporal window that impedes evaluating historical changes of climate and their impacts on biodiversity. To fill this gap, we developed climate gridded surfaces for Mexico for three periods that cover most of the 20th and early 21st centuries: t1-1940 (1910–1949), t2-1970 (1950–1979) and t3-2000 (1980–2009), and used these interpolated surfaces to describe how climate has changed over time, both countrywide and in its 19 biogeographic provinces. Results from our characterization of climate change indicate that the mean annual temperature has increased by nearly 0.2°C on average across the whole country from t2-1970 to t3-2000. However, changes have not been spatially uniform: Nearctic provinces in the north have suffered higher temperature increases than southern tropical regions. Central and southern provinces cooled at the beginning of the 20th century but warmed consistently since the 1970s. Precipitation increased between t1-1940 and t2-1970 across the country, more notably in the northern provinces, and it decreased between t2-1970 and t3-2000 in most of the country. Results on the historical climate conditions in Mexico may be useful for climate change analyses for both environmental and social sciences. Nonetheless, our climatology was based on information from climate stations for which 9.4–36.2% presented inhomogeneities over time probably owing to non-climatic factors, and climate station density changed over time. Therefore, the estimated changes observed in our analysis need to be interpreted cautiously.
Highlights
Climate change has been recognized as one of the major drivers of socio-environmental disruption in recent years [1,2] due to its strong effect on demographic, geographic and ecosystem processes [1,3,4,5,6]
We analyzed monthly minimum and maximum temperature and accumulated rainfall data gathered from weather stations from the National Meteorological Office that were previously organized by Cuervo-Robayo [17], to derive monthly mean climate surfaces for three periods: t1-1940 (1910–1949), t2-1970 (1950–1979) and t3-2000 (1980–2009)
We selected these periods based on previous global [38,39] and regional [19] climate change analysis and we considered the number of stations available for each period [40]
Summary
Climate change has been recognized as one of the major drivers of socio-environmental disruption in recent years [1,2] due to its strong effect on demographic, geographic and ecosystem processes [1,3,4,5,6]. One of the main inputs for regional or global climate change assessments are interpolated climate surfaces at a high spatial resolution of both present-day/historical climate and downscaled surfaces of future climate projections [12]. High-resolution gridded climate surfaces (referred to as “climate surfaces” from here on) for global land areas have been useful for assessing how climate change affects biodiversity [13]. Global databases, such as WorldClim and Climond, are freely available [12,14], these databases present some shortcomings that impede evaluating the historical climate change and their impacts on biodiversity; for example, they span only a single period of time in the late 20th century. Regardless, time series information at the level of climate stations is available for climate change analysis [18,19], some regions across the country lack adequate spatial coverage
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