Abstract
The increase in the greenhouse gas emissions leads to changes in the mechanisms connecting the two major river basins in South America, the Amazon and La Plata basins, at subcontinental scale. Studies very often neglect to address the impact of the model-component choices on the projected change in precipitation in the two river basins. Within that context, the present study investigates the probable causes of changes in the hydroclimate of the two river basins through projections from three global climate models—driven by the pathway with no stabilization of the emissions growth by 2100—with focus on the warming of regions in the equatorial Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Because the annual cycle of the precipitation differs in the northern and southern portions of the two river basins, changes are then preferably assessed in subregions. The model-dependent results project the following changes in the physical and dynamic mechanisms toward the end of the twenty-first century: (i) intensification of the 850-hPa northerly moisture flux from the western tropical Atlantic in the eastern side of the central Andes; and (ii) increase in the magnitude of the 200-hPa wind core whose location largely coincides with the La Plata basin. Those changes may increase the precipitation in the northern Amazon and southern La Plata basins by the end of the century. In contrast, the decrease in precipitation in the northern La Plata basin may result from the decrease in length of the rainy season associated with South American Monsoon System.
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The data used in this work are available to download from their developers’ or authorized websites listed in the Acknowledgements section.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) for supporting the Graduate Program in Meteorology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and therefore making this work possible. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and Climate Dynamics’ Editor and Editorial Office for all support. R. Libonati was supported by CNPQ: Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (grant 305159/2018–6), and by FAPERJ: Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (grant E26/202.714/2019). T. Ambrizzi would like to acknowledge the partial support from CNPq, FAPESP and INCT Climate Change–Phase 2. NOAA GFDL’s data portal provided the global models’ outputs available at https://data1.gfdl.noaa.gov. The University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) provided the CRU TS 4.01 precipitation data. The University of Delaware (UDEL) and the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) precipitation data products were provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSL, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their website at https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.UDel_AirT_Precip.html and https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.gpcc.html, respectively. The Taylor Diagram script running under Python programming language was adapted from Yannick Copin’s version 2018-12-06, which has been placed in the public domain.
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Gomes, G.D., Nunes, A.M.B., Libonati, R. et al. Projections of subcontinental changes in seasonal precipitation over the two major river basins in South America under an extreme climate scenario. Clim Dyn 58, 1147–1169 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05955-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-021-05955-x