Hydrometeorological Simulations and Their Sensitivity to Land Use Changes in La Plata Basin

OMAR V. MÜLLER; ERNESTO H. BERBERY

Seattle

Seminario; Weekly seminar of Land Surface Hydrology Research Group of University of Washington; 2011

Land Surface Hydrology Research Group of University of Washington

Extreme events have been often linked to SSTs in SA. However, climate models show difficulties in reproducing the pattern of these events. The hypothesis of this research is that surface processes affected by land cover changes may have a local effect over heat fluxes. Long-term simulations using different vegetation maps as lower boundary conditions were carried out using the regional coupled model WRF/Noah. The results show that a more realistic representation of land covers improves the forecasts of the drought and help to reduce biases in regions of high rainfall.