Development of statistically unbiased twenty-first century hydrology scenarios over La Plata Basin

SAURRAL, RAMIRO; MONTROULL, NATALIA; CAMILLONI, INÉS

International Journal of River Basin Management

Taylor & Francis

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2013 vol. 11 p. 329 - 343

1571-5124

There is an increasing demand for future climate scenarios, particularly for impact studies. In this study, simulation outputs taken from a set of four Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are used to force a hydrologic model to derive future streamflow scenarios for La Plata Basin (LPB). As RCMs have biases in their mean precipitation and temperature fields, a statistical scheme is used to remove the systematic part of the bias. Future hydrologic scenarios were derived considering two future periods: 2021-2040 (near future) and 2071-2090 (far future). In terms of climate projections, RCMs predict warmer conditions in almost the whole basin, while precipitation variations are not less uniform in sign across the basin. Nevertheless, a trend towards a gradual increase in streamflow was found for the majority of the rivers in the basin, with variations among them. Future changes in the largest monthly streamflow are similar to those in the mean values, with also some differences among RCMs and on the sub-basin considered.