Dry spells: RCMs performance to simulate present climate and projections for future climate in South America. In 21st Century Challenges in Regional Climate Modelling

ZANINELLI P.; CARRIL A. F.; MENENDEZ C.G.; SANCHEZ E.

Lund

Conferencia; 3rd International Lund Regional-Scale Climate Modelling Workshop; 2014

Baltex

Dry spells can generate significant economic lost inactivities related to land use (e.g. agriculture andforestry), cause deficit in water resources andoccasionally damage the health of the population(Magrin et al. (2007)), making it important to study.Typical definitions of dry spells imply the use of fixedthresholds, both to define dry days as to define dry spells(Lana et al. (2008), Sánchez et al. (2011), Rivera et al.(2012)), which serve to relatively small regions or regionswith similar climatological characteristics. But when weneed to study large domains with different climatecharacteristics the use of fixed thresholds could resultinappropriate.In this work our aim is to study the ability of regionalclimate models (RCMs) to capture the present-day dryspells over South America and the projected changesbased on a variable-threshold approach.