Current and Future Climate Extremes Over Latin America and Caribbean: Assessing Earth System Models from High Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP)

Abstract

Extreme temperature and precipitation events are the primary triggers of hazards, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and landslides, with localized impacts. In this sense, the finer grids of Earth System models (ESMs) could play an essential role in better estimating extreme climate events. The performance of High Resolution Model Intercomparison Project (HighResMIP) models is evaluated using the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) over the 1981–2014 period and future changes (2021–2050) under Shared Socioeconomic Pathway SSP5–8.5, over ten regions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The impact of increasing the horizontal resolution in estimating extreme climate variability on a regional scale is first compared against reference gridded datasets, including reanalysis, satellite, and merging products. We used three different groups based on the resolution of the model’s grid (sg): (i) low (0.8° ≤ sg ≤ 1.87°), (ii) intermediate (0.5° ≤ sg ≤ 0.7°), and (iii) high (0.23° ≥ sg ≤ 0.35°). Our analysis indicates that there was no clear evidence to support the posit that increasing horizontal resolution improves model performance. The ECMWF-IFS family of models appears to be a plausible choice to represent climate extremes, followed by the ensemble mean of HighResMIP in their intermediate resolution. For future climate, the projections indicate a consensus of temperature and precipitation climate extremes increase across most of the ten regions. Despite the uncertainties presented in this study, climate models have been and will continue to be an important tool for assessing risk in the face of extreme events.

Impact of climate change in Mexican winegrape regions

“…The expected values of the hydrothermal index, HTC, for this region are between 1 and 1.5 mm·°C −1 , which are ideal for growing grapevines. On the contrary, in Baja California precipitation could slightly increase during the GS, consistent with other model results (Cavazos & Arriaga‐Ramírez, 2012), while there could be a minimal decrease in winter, but with high variation due to atmospheric rivers (Gershunov et al, 2019), extreme events (Avila‐Diaz et al, 2022), and changes in natural oscillations, such as El Niño–Southern Oscillation (IPCC, 2021). The Mexican HP region is also affected by ENSO variations during the summer and winter (e.g., Vega‐Camarena et al, 2023).…”

Profiling sociodemographic attributes and extreme precipitation events as mediators of climate-induced disasters in municipalities in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil

“…These risks are typically called technological disasters, such as dam failures, atomic reactor leaks, and water pollution due to industrial discharge (Andrade L. et al, 2021). Other "produced" risks include anthropogenic changes in climatic conditions, which can ultimately lead to the increased occurrence and intensification of disasters, such as floods, droughts, and landslides (Quintão et al, 2017;Avila-Diaz et al, 2022).…”

“…A third axis encompasses studies that link climate data (usually measured in a continuous resolution, based on raster data) with disaster and population data (mostly discrete in their measurement and availability). The major challenge facing these studies is how to link climate data, which follow an Earth systems logic, with population data that are captured and measured in artificial administrative units (Avila-Diaz et al, 2022). Two major challenges manifest themselves in the form of spatial resolution (raster vs. polygonal/point discrete data) and temporal resolution (how long the data must be monitored to detect changes).…”

“…For example, Andrade L. et al (2021) sampled climate data points from the Climdex Project, available in a 0.25 • × 0.25 • resolution, to discretize information on climate extremes at the mesoregional level. These discretized data points, encompassing a time series The interaction between homogenous climatic zones and socioeconomic contexts helps identify climate vulnerability hotspots (Menezes et al, 2018;Avila-Diaz et al, 2022). Vulnerability reduction depends on the ability of each society to improve protective mechanisms (adaptive capacity), which include private insurance (contractual insurance policies, selfprotection, information seeking, home improvement) and public technologies (such as extreme weather alerts from official climate agencies).…”

Urgency of understanding and responding to hydroclimatic impacts in Colombia

“…This would be attributed to the overcoming of thresholds of the thermoregulatory capacity of the human body, hindered by the concomitant increase in humidity and temperature, particularly in low-elevation tropical cities. All these impacts are particularly worrisome given that, under a business-as-usual scenario, a significant increase in temperature (e.g., warm days, heatwaves) and precipitation (e.g., very wet days, rainfall intensity) extremes over the mid-twenty-first century is likely to occur in Colombia [5].…”