Soil conditions influence in seasonal forecasting of precipitation climate extremes in Brazil

Abstract

<abstract> <b>Abstract.</b><i> The Brazilian energy matrix is built on renewable energy, making Brazil a country vulnerable to climatic conditions. Improving regional models to simulate extreme events in the seasonal forecast can lead to a better planning of hydropower plants (HPP) to control their reservoirs. In this paper we study the influence of initial soil conditions and soil type in seasonal forecasting of precipitation climate extremes over part of the São Francisco river basin in Brazil. The periods of analysis are the dry and rainy seasons in southeast Brazil, between the years 1979 and 2012. Eta model shows sensitivity to changes in soil when different soil conditions are used in the model integration. However, changes in soil map influenced more the variation of simulated rainfall than the initial soil moisture. The climatology of the experiments with the soil map of 26 types tends to represent better the climate of South America. In all experiments, the calculated indexes and the total accumulated precipitation for the dry and rainy seasons in Brazil were underestimated over the region of HPP Três Marias.</i>