How do GCMs represent daily maximum and minimum temperatures in La Plata Basin?

BETTOLLI, PENALBA, KRIEGER

Cancun

Congreso; AGU Meeting of the Americas; 2013

his work focuses on southern La Plata Basin region which is one of the most important agriculture and hydropower producing regions worldwide. Extreme climate events such as cold and heat waves and frost events have a significant socio-economic impact. It is a big challenge for global climate models (GCMs) to simulate regional patterns, temporal variations and distribution of temperature in a daily basis. Taking into account the present and future relevance of the region for the economy of the countries involved, it is very important to analyze maximum and minimum temperatures for model evaluation and development. This kind of study is aslo the basis for a great deal of the statistical downscaling methods in a climate change context. The aim of this study is to analyze the ability of the GCMs to reproduce the observed daily maximum and minimum temperatures in the southern La Plata Basin region. To this end, daily fields of maximum and minimum temperatures from a set of 15 GCMs were used. The outputs corresponding to the historical experiment for the reference period 1979-1999 were obtained from the WCRP CMIP5 (World Climate Research Programme Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5). In order to compare daily temperature values in the southern La Plata Basin region as generated by GCMs to those derived from observations, daily maximum and minimum temperatures were used from the gridded dataset generated by the Claris LPB Project (?A Europe-South America Network for Climate Change Assessment and Impact Studies in La Plata Basin?). Additionally, reference station data was included in the study. The analysis was focused on austral winter (June, July, August) and summer (December, January,