%0 Journal Article
%T Regional Climate Modeling over South America: A Review
%A Silvina A. Solman
%J Advances in Meteorology
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/504357
%X This review summarizes the progress achieved on regional climate modeling activities over South America since the early efforts at the beginning of the 2000s until now. During the last 10 years, simulations with regional climate models (RCMs) have been performed for several purposes over the region. Early efforts were mainly focused on sensitivity studies to both physical mechanisms and technical aspects of RCMs. The last developments were focused mainly on providing high-resolution information on regional climate change. This paper describes the most outstanding contributions from the isolated efforts to the ongoing coordinated RCM activities in the framework of the CORDEX initiative, which represents a major endeavor to produce ensemble climate change projections at regional scales and allows exploring the associated range of uncertainties. The remaining challenges in modeling South American climate features are also discussed. 1. Introduction One of the main motivations for developing Regional Climate Models (RCMs) has been the need for producing climate information at the regional level to assess the impacts of climate change. It is a well-known fact that, to date, Atmosphere Ocean Global climate Models (AOGCMs) are the only tools available to predict the future evolution of the climate system in response to anthropogenic forcings, such as the increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations. During the last decades, coupled global models have been continuously improved, mostly due to the increasing computational capacity and the improved representation of different components of the climate system: the atmosphere, the oceans, and the land-surface. However, the most updated global models within the suit of the CMIP5 initiative [1] operate on horizontal resolutions of the order of hundreds of kilometers [2]. The lack of regional details in current AOGCMs limits their capability in capturing regional-scale processes forced by topographic features or other regional-scale forcings. These regional-scale forcings are responsible for modulating the large-scale circulation features that determine the regional climate. Moreover, coarse resolution also limits the applicability of global model outputs for impact studies that demand information on much finer spatial scales. Since the early 1990s, RCMs became the most widespread methodology to add further detail to global climate simulations. After the pioneering work by Giorgi and Mearns [3], the development of RCMs has led to increased resolution, longer model simulations, and developments towards regional
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/amete/2013/504357/