Developing regional climate change scenarios over southern South America for the 2020´s and 2050´s with the MM5/CIMA model forced by the global HadAM3H model.

CABRÉ, MARÍA FERNANDA

IANIGLA, CCT CONICET Mendoza (CRICyT), Argentina

Workshop; Coloquio Internacional: Estacionalidad y Recursos Hídricos en el Hemisferio Occidental; 2008

IAI

Dynamical downscaling of global climate simulations is the most adequate tool tp generate regional projections of climate change. This technique involves at least  a present climate simulation and a simulation of a future scenario, usually at the end of the twenty first century. Regional projections for a  variety of scenarios and periods are often required by the impact community, so the pattern scalling technique has been usually used to generate them. This  technique is used to estimate information on climate change for periods and scenarios not simulated by the regional model. We used this technique for estimating near future regional climate change scenarios over southern South America for seasonal changes of temperature and precipitation for the 2020s and the 2050s. The results show that the pattern scaling works well for estimating mean temperature changes for which the regional changes are linearly related tothe global mean temperature change. For preciitation changes, the validity of the scalability assumptions is weaker.