CLARIS LPB WP5: Regional Climate Change assessments for La Plata Basin.

SOLMAN S.A.; E. SANCHEZ; P. SAMUELSSON; H BERBERY; A R REMEDIO; R P DA ROCHA; S. C. CHOU; L. LI

CLIVAR EXCHANGES

International CLIVAR Project Office

Lugar: Southampton; Año: 2011 vol. 16 p. 19 - 21

1026-0471

The CLARIS LPB Project aims at predicting the regional climate change impacts on La Plata Basin (LPB) in South America and at designing adaptation strategies for regional stakeholders. One of the main issues to achieve this objective relies on the development of ensembles of coordinated regional climate scenarios for dynamical downscaling over LPB. WP5 addresses two important components regarding the development of regional climate change scenarios for LPB: (a) performing an ensemble of coordinated regional scenarios; and (b) understanding the causes of uncertainties in regional model simulations. Results provided by WP5 represent the key input for other WPs, such as WP6 focused on   evaluating extreme events, WP8 and WP9, focused on evaluating impacts on agriculture and hydrology. The main objective of WP5 is to better understand the regional effects of climate change and variability on various components of the hydrologic cycle of LPB, with emphasis on land surface-atmosphere feedbacks. The first challenge was to design a coordinated experiment to produce ensembles of regional simulations over South America in order to evaluate the capability of the state-of-the-art regional climate models (RCMs) in reproducing the observed climate and investigating the associated uncertainty. The second challenge is to perform an ensemble of coordinated regional scenarios for LPB at two time horizons (2010-2040 and 2070-2100) in order to evaluate the uncertainties in the future regional scenarios.