CLIMATE VARIABILITY IN SOUTHERN BRAZIL PRECIPITATION IN PRESENT AND FUTURE CLIMATE

Climate and its changes have been showing great prominence lately. In this way, it is important to analyze the precipitation trends for the understanding of the potential impacts that changes in climate may result in the society. This paper presents an analysis of the precipitation trend in Rio Grande do Sul, for three sets of data, with a comparison of the observed precipitation data and simulated data by RegCM3 Regional Model, as well as an analysis of the trend in a future climate scenario. This analysis was performed using different statistical tests, which calculated the of precipitation trends for the observed precipitation data, for the RegCM3 model data for the same period, 1982-2006, and for the 2070 to 2086 future climate modeled data. Evaluating the percentage of dry and wet events obtained from the observed data (PREC_LA), it was found that the modes in the synoptic band contribute greatly to dry events than to wet events. Yet in the intraseasonal band there is more contribution to the wet than to the dry events. The analyzed modes in the interannual band contribute equally to dry and wet events. However, when we observed the events in the simulated data (PREC_RE), the model failed to reproduce the observed results.

Trend; Future Scenarios; Precipitation.