Climate Change in Argentina: Third National Communication- The framework for model selection and development of high resolution climate projections

CAMILLONI INES; SOLMAN SILVINA ALICIA; BARROS VICENTE; CARRIL ANDREA F; NUÑEZ MARIO NÉSTOR

Sao Jose dos Campos

Workshop; IPCC Workshop on Regional Climate Projections and their Use in Impacts and Risk Analysis Studies; 2015

IPCC

One of the main objectives of the Third National Communication on Climate Change for Argentina was assessing the climate change projections for the twenty first century. Taking advantage of the CMIP5 initiative (Taylor et al., 2012) the large number of GCMs available allowed exploring not only the capability of GCMs in reproducing the main features of current climate over Argentina but also quantifying the uncertainty in both, present climate and future projections. However, due to the horizontal resolution of GCMs is still insufficient for the impact users community, GCM-driven Regional Climate Models (RCMs) operating at higher spatial resolution (50 km) performed for the South American continent under the framework of the CLARIS-LPB Project were also used. All RCMs were forced by CMIP3-GCMs under the SRESA1B scenario. The number of simulations available, from both the CMIP5 GCM ensemble and CLARIS-LPB RCM ensemble, includes more than 50 models. However, it is well known that model evaluation is the first step in order to build objective criteria for model selection, before exploring the future climate. In this context, the main aim of this work was to assess the capability of both GCMs and RCMs in simulating present climate conditions over Argentina and developing objective criteria for model selection. Evaluating models? performance allowed identifying systematic model biases. Hence, another objective of this work was to remove systematic climate biases in the selected GCMs and RCMs in order to produce a set of high-resolution climate projection dataset (0.5°lat x 0.5°lon) appropriate for the national climate change impact studies.