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Climate change in the Iberian Upwelling System: a numerical study using GCM downscaling

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Abstract

The present work aims at evaluating the impacts of a climate change scenario on the hydrography and dynamics of the Iberian Upwelling System. Using regional ocean model configurations, the study domain is forced with three different sets of surface fields: a climatological dataset to provide the control run; a dataset obtained from averaging several global climate models (GCM) that integrate the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) models used in climate scenarios, for the same period as the climatological dataset; and this same dataset but for a future period, retrieved from the IPCC A2 climate scenario. After ascertaining that the ocean run forced with the GCM dataset for the present compared reasonably well with the climatologically forced run, the results for the future run (relative to the respective present run) show a general temperature increase (from +0.5 to +3 °C) and salinity decrease (from −0.1 to −0.3), particularly in the upper 100–200 m, although these differences depend strongly on season and distance to the coast. There is also strengthening of the SST cross-shore gradient associated to upwelling, which causes narrowing and shallowing of the upwelling jet. This effect is contrary to the meridional wind stress intensification that is also observed, which would tend to strengthen the upwelling jet.

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Acknowledgments

A. Cordeiro Pires was supported by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) through PhD fellowship SFRH/BD/47500/2008. R. Nolasco was supported by the FCT program “Ciência 2007″. A.M. Ramos was supported by FCT through post-doctoral fellowship SFRH/BPD/84328/2012. This work was supported by the Spanish project CTM2011-30155-C03-01 (Ministério de Economia y Competitividad). We acknowledge the modeling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), the WCRP Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM), and the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy for the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset. The authors would like to thank the reviewers of this paper, whose comments have greatly improved the manuscript, and who have contributed to its current form.

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  1. Ana Cordeiro Pires

    Present address: IPMA – Instituto Português do Mar e da Atmosfera, Rua C do Aeroporto, 1749-077, Lisbon, Portugal

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CESAM – Centre for Environmental and Marine Studies, University of Aveiro, Campus de Santiago, 3810-193, Aveiro, Portugal

    Ana Cordeiro Pires, Rita Nolasco, Alfredo Rocha & Jesus Dubert

  2. Instituto Dom Luiz (IDL), Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa, Edf. C8, Piso 3, Sala 8.3.1, Campo Grande, 1749-016, Lisbon, Portugal

    Alexandre M. Ramos

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Correspondence to Ana Cordeiro Pires.

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Cordeiro Pires, A., Nolasco, R., Rocha, A. et al. Climate change in the Iberian Upwelling System: a numerical study using GCM downscaling. Clim Dyn 47, 451–464 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2848-y

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