15. Climatology of extreme events in Southern America. Observed climatic change and future scenarios.
PI, CoPIs: Rusticucci, Penalba
Period: 2007-2009
Total budget: US$ 165.000
Summary:
Climatology of extreme events over Southern South America.
Observed Climate Change and future scenarios The impact of the variability and the climatic change in the environment
and in the man activities depends principally on the change in the frequency of occurrence or the intensity of the extreme events.
The extreme values that can reach the temperature or the rainfall are highly local, though his variability includes sometimes extensive regions.
With these considerations, they are necessary studies that focus in the proper characteristics of the orography,
the human activities and the climate of every region. The most developed countries invest seriously in studies on the climatic change,
for his region, in order to advance in the knowledge to be prepared and to diminish the negative impact and to increase the impact that
could turn out to be a positive. In our latitudes, the high and low temperatures and the excesses or deficits of rainfall are the extreme
events that more affect the population. Extremes occurrence affects severely the agricultural and cattle sector; many crops meet
affected by the number of frost days per year, or for the quantity of hot days per year, as well as small changes in the percentage
of rain that evaporates or infiltrates produce important changes in the runoff. The study of the changes in the occurrence of these
extremes allows us for analogy to foresee their changes in the future, as well as to use the results to validate models who construct
future scenarios. The knowledge of extremes behavior, as well as of their probability function are fundamental for these purposes.
The study of the atmospheric circulation associated with the occurrence of certain meteorological events, will help to understand
the physical mechanisms of the occurrence of the extremes. Even more, to study the manners of joint, spatial and temporary variability,
will help to the forecast of certain extreme events. This project proposes to study with the major degree of detail the variability of
the daily extremes of temperature (waves of heat and cold) and rainfall (excesses and droughts) in the Southeast of South America,
researching on their distributions, relations with the circulation and the surrounding ocean, and to project on the scenarios of
climatic change their possible change. The general aim is to reach is of finding the best approximation to the estimation of the
values of the extremes of temperature and rainfall that will happen in the next years, under a climatic change, by means of diverse methodologies.
It proposes to find the distribution function of the intensity and the persistence of these extremes for the major quantity of
localities of the South of South America, in order to provide suitable results tending to evaluate the possible impacts that
these changes could cause in diverse areas.