CLARIS Project: towards climate downscaling in South America using RCA3

MENÉNDEZ CLAUDIO GUILLERMO; SÖRENSSON ANNA AMELIA; SAMUELSSON PATRICK; WILLÉN ULRIKA; HANSSON ULF; DE CASTRO MANUEL; BOULANGER JEAN-PHILIPPE

Lund, Suecia

Workshop; 2nd Lund Regional-scale Climate Modelling Workshop: 21st Century Challenges in Regional-scale Climate Modelling.; 2009

Baltex

This paper documents coordinated work carried out with the Rossby Centre regional atmospheric climate model (RCA3, Kjellström et al., 2005) within the work package on downscaling in the sub-tropical and mid-latitude South America of the European Union project ‘A Europe-South America Network for Climate Change Assessment and Impact Studies’ (CLARIS, http://www.claris-eu.org). The goal of this 3-year interdisciplinary project was to build an integrated European-South American network dedicated to promote common research strategies to observe and predict climate changes and their consequent socio-economic impacts taking into account the climate and societal peculiarities of South America. CLARIS was built on experience obtained through other European Projects such as e.g. PRUDENCE, MICE and ENSEMBLES and was, in a more modest way, a counterpart of these projects in South America. Details on the project and its main results are summarized in Boulanger et al. (2009). The work package on downscaling has promoted the co-ordinated participation of European and South American research teams in the use and development of regional dynamical models and statistical downscaling techniques. In particular, a collaboration between Rossby Centre (Sweden) and the Centro de Investigaciones del Mar y la Atmósfera (Argentina) was established with the purpose of pursuing climate research in South America using RCA3.