Impacts of Climate Change on the hydrology of the la Plata Basin

ANTHONY SCHRAPFFER; SÖRENSSON ANNA AMELIA; POLCHER JAN

São Paulo

Workshop; São Paulo School of Advanced Science on Climate Change: Scientific basis, adaptation, vulnerability, mitigation; 2017

InterAmerican Institute for global change (IAI)

p { margin-bottom: 0.25cm; direction: ltr; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; }LaPlata basin is the fifth bigger basin in the world and its aquaticresources are fundamental for the socio-economic development ofArgentina, Bolivia, Brazil Paraguay and Uruguay. Mainly in theagriculture sector and the livestock farming. This area includes awide variety of climates (from tropical to subtropical and frommoderate hot climate to arid). Moreover, the climate predictions forthe next 50 years differ from one sub-basin to another, as much aslocal-scale problematics, contamination, deforestation andurbanization. The range of possible Climate Change impacts is verylarge and will imply a great diversity of adaptation measures.Theobjective of this thesis is to investigate the Climate Change impactson the key processes of the rivers using a last generationsuperficie-model, ORCHIDEE ?a French continental superficie-model-and connecting it to a regional atmospherical-model, WRF.The first part of the study will focus onORCHIDEE, the model will be checked to evaluate its sensibility andthe processes that should be improved in order to experience it andfind the more appropriate ORCHIDEE version.Thesecond part will concern the combination of ORCHIDEE model and WRFmodel to simulate past and future climate of La Plata basin in orderto evaluate the main changes of the discharges of the rives and theirconsequences.