The hydrologic cycle of the La Plata Basin in the WCRP-CMIP3 multimodel dataset

SAURRAL, R.

JOURNAL OF HYDROMETEOROLOGY

AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC

Año: 2010 vol. 11 p. 1083 - 1102

1525-755X

General Circulation Models (GCMs) forced under different greenhouse gases emission and socioeconomic scenarios are currently the most extended tool throughout the scientific community to infer the future climate on Earth. However, these models have still problems in capturing several aspects of regional climate variability in many parts of the globe. In this paper, the hydrological cycle of the La Plata Basin is simulated using the Variable Infiltration Capacity (VIC) distributed hydrology model and forced with atmospheric data from different GCMs, to determine up to which extent errors in temperature and precipitation fields impact the hydrology of the basin. The skill assessment is performed in terms of simulated runoff at difference closing points.  Simulated hydrographs show that all the GCMs present deficiencies in simulating the regional climatology of southern South America and this leads to a very poor representation of the hydrological cycle of the main rivers across the basin. Two unbiasing schemes are then proposed as a mean to correct the GCM outputs before forcing the hydrology model and comparisons between biased and unbiased simulations are performed. Results indicate that both schemes, though methodologically different, reduce the water cycle simulations bias. Finally, VIC is forced with data from the GCMs for the next decades (2030 and 2070) under different socio-economic scenarios (A1B, A2 and B1) to determine the potential changes in streamflow due to climate change for the rest of the present century.