INVESTIGADORES
VERA Carolina Susana
artículos
Título:
Climate Variability and Change in South America
Autor/es:
MCPHADEN, M.; VERA, C.; MARTINEZ GUINGLA, R.
Revista:
EOS TRANSACTIONS - AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
Editorial:
American Geophysical Union
Referencias:
Lugar: Washington; Año: 2010 vol. 91 p. 473 - 473
ISSN:
0096-3941
Resumen:
El Niño and the Southern Oscillation
(ENSO) have profound effects on South
American climate. Warm ENSO events
(El Niños) and cold ENSO events (La Niñas),
which occur on year-to-year time scales, are
associated with droughts, floods, and other
extreme weather events across the continent.
Anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming
of the planet will also likely have a profound
effect on South America, through
both gradual shifts in the baseline climate
and increases in extreme events, including
possible changes in the ENSO cycle.
There are indications that climate change
may already be having an impact in South
America, with temperature trends observed
in the Galápagos and in the altiplano of the
northern Andes and in the shrinking of tropical
mountain glaciers. There has also been
a shift in the behavior of El Niño, with an
increased tendency for warm sea surface
temperature anomalies to be concentrated
in the central Pacific rather than in the
eastern Pacific during the past 2 decades.
These central Pacific (or Modoki, which
means similar but different in Japanese)
El Niños have a different signature than eastern
Pacific El Niños in terms of teleconnection
patterns on weather variability in South
America and in terms of effects on marine
ecosystems and fisheries along the west
coast of the continent. However, the instrumental
climate record is relatively short, and
many of the observed trends could simply
be the result of natural decadal climate variability
that is unresolved in observations.