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chapter - Atmospheric and Oceanic Science

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13.1. Introduction<br />

Scenarios of changes in the future climate of the La Plata basin are an important<br />

issue to be developed by the scientific community <strong>and</strong> transferred to several<br />

sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, water resources, hydroelectric power,<br />

construction, tourism <strong>and</strong> others. Changes in precipitation, temperature <strong>and</strong> wind<br />

regimes, frequency of storms, frequency of dry or wet days, extreme weather conditions,<br />

are features that can have strong social influence. Simulations of the future<br />

climate can give an idea of these changes based on the physical mechanisms of<br />

global warming due to the increase of greenhouse gases. Other changes as deforestation,<br />

increase of aerosols <strong>and</strong> changes in the ozone layer can also be included<br />

in the models to investigate their influence on future climate.<br />

The use of Global Circulation Models (GCMs) for the climate change scenarios<br />

development allows assessing global impacts of changes, mainly in greenhouse<br />

gases, but also of other processes. To investigate regional changes in the atmospheric<br />

variables <strong>and</strong> conditions, other methods can be considered that will be presented<br />

in section 13.2. It is already known that climate simulations using different models<br />

can display different global <strong>and</strong> regional results (Lau et al. 1996; Gates et al. 1999).<br />

Then, all the results from several models can be taken into account to evaluate the<br />

uncertainty around the average model ensemble.<br />

13.2. Regional climatic scenarios<br />

Outputs provided by GCMs in general do not have enough spatial resolution<br />

to be applied in regional evaluations of climatic change impacts. Hence, several<br />

methods have been developed in order to generate regional scenarios based on<br />

GCMs but with a smaller resolution than the model. This procedure is called<br />

“downscaling”. Next are described the different “downscaling” available methods.<br />

13.2.1. Direct use of GCM outputs<br />

The simpler method is to use the outputs provided by GCMs at the closest to<br />

the study area grid point. In this method the analysis is made considering the global<br />

outputs in a specific region. However, this method presents little reliability due<br />

to the low spatial resolution of the GCMs.<br />

13.2.2. Interpolation of GCM outputs<br />

Regional climatic scenarios<br />

The easiest way to make a “downscaling” is by interpolating GCM results<br />

with the grid points closest to the location or area of interest. The problem with this<br />

method is that introduces a false geographical accuracy.<br />

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