Regional climate change experiments over southern South America. II: Climate change scenarios in the late twenty-first century

Abstract

We present an analysis of climate change over southern South America as simulated by a regional climate model. The regional model MM5 was nested within time-slice global atmospheric model experiments conducted by the HadAM3H model. The simulations cover a 10-year period representing present-day climate (1981–1990) and two future scenarios for the SRESA2 and B2 emission scenarios for the period 2081–2090. There are a few quantitative differences between the two regional scenarios. The simulated changes are larger for the A2 than the B2 scenario, although with few qualitative differences. For the two regional scenarios, the warming in southern Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia and northeastern Argentina is particularly large in spring. Over the western coast of South America both scenarios project a general decrease in precipitation. Both the A2 and B2 simulations show a general increase in precipitation in northern and central Argentina especially in summer and fall and a general decrease in precipitation in winter and spring. In fall the simulations agree on a general decrease in precipitation in southern Brazil. This reflects changes in the atmospheric circulation during winter and spring. Changes in mean sea level pressure show a cell of increasing pressure centered somewhere in the southern Atlantic Ocean and southern Pacific Ocean, mainly during summer and fall in the Atlantic and in spring in the Pacific. In relation to the pressure distribution in the control run, this indicates a southward extension of the summer mean Atlantic and Pacific subtropical highs.