DATE2016-05-31 13:58:04
IDABSTRACT20160531135804-1065
CONTACTesteban@ugr.es
PRESENTATIONPOSTER
INVITED0
IDSESSION4
TITLEASSESSING THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN FUTURE DROUGHTS EPISODES OVER SPAIN USING WRF
AUTHORSMatidle García-valdecasas-ojeda (1), Sebastiano De Franciscis (1), Sonia Raquel Gámiz-fortis (1), Yolanda Castro-díez (1), María Jesús Esteban-parra (1)
AFFILIATIONS
  1. Applied Physics Department, University Of Granada Granada (Spain)
ABSTRACTThe Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which is recommended by the World Meteorological Organization, is a robust and well-reviewed index widely applied to evaluate drought events. However, the SPI is based on precipitation data and not considers changes in the temperature evolution. Thereby, the increase expected in the temperature (and in the evapotranspiration consequently) in the future can generate substantial errors in the prediction of droughts events in a context of climate change. The Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) is a recent proposed drought index that is similar to the SPI with the additional benefit of including temperature evolution since it is based on a water balance (Precipitation minus evapotranspiration). This study assesses the simulated future droughts occurrences characterized by these two drought indices in order to quantify the effects of temperature on future droughts episodes by comparison of these droughts indices. For that, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model was used to obtain the projected future precipitation and temperature data to compute the droughts indices. The simulations were performed for two 30-yr periods (2021-2050 and 2071-2100) with a spatial resolution of 0.088º over a domain encompassing the Iberian Peninsula, nested in the coarser EURO-CORDEX domain (0.44° resolution). WRF model was driven by the global bias-corrected climate model output data from version 1 of NCAR's Community Earth System Model (CESM1) using two different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) scenarios: RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5. Results of this study will be a useful tool to understand how the increase of the temperature will affect in the droughts variability in a context of climate change to detect and monitor future droughts episodes properly. Acknowledgements: This work has been financed by the projects P11-RNM-7941 (Junta de Andalucía-Spain) and CGL2013-48539-R (MINECO-Spain, FEDER).
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