Climate change in Central America and Mexico: regional climate model validation and climate change projections

Abstract

Central America has high biodiversity, it harbors high-value ecosystems and it's important to provide regional climate change information to assist in adaptation and mitigation work in the region. Here we study climate change projections for Central America and Mexico using a regional climate model. The model evaluation shows its success in simulating spatial and temporal variability of temperature and precipitation and also in capturing regional climate features such as the bimodal annual cycle of precipitation and the Caribbean low-level jet. A variety of climate regimes within the model domain are also better identified in the regional model simulation due to improved resolution of topographic features. Although, the model suffers from large precipitation biases, it shows improvements over the coarse-resolution driving model in simulating precipitation amounts. The model shows a dry bias in the wet season and a wet bias in the dry season suggesting that it's unable to capture the full range of precipitation variability. Projected warming under the A2 scenario is higher in the wet season than that in the dry season with the Yucatan Peninsula experiencing highest warming. A large reduction in precipitation in the wet season is projected for the region, whereas parts of Central America that receive a considerable amount of moisture in the form of orographic precipitation show significant decreases in precipitation in the dry season. Projected climatic changes can have detrimental impacts on biodiversity as they are spatially similar, but far greater in magnitude, than those observed during the El Niño events in recent decades that adversely affected species in the region.

A review of observed and projected changes in climate for the islands in the Caribbean

“…Changes, then, in ENSO and NAO variability in the future will affect climate variability in the Caribbean. The regional model PRECIS performed reasonably well in capturing the interannual variability in Central American temperature because the baseline simulations used observed SSTs as the surface boundary conditions and therefore a realistic ENSO forcing (Karmalkar et al, 2011). However, the global climate models used in this study show a varying degree of performances when tested for their ability to capture ENSO variations and disagree significantly on its future behavior (AchutaRao and Sperber, 2006).…”

“…shown the importance of added value of PRECIS RCM in the Caribbean (Campbell et al, 2010) and in Central America (Karmalkar et al, 2008(Karmalkar et al, , 2011. Overestimation of precipitation in the late season at higher latitudes in the western Caribbean and underestimation of precipitation in the wet season in Jamaica and Hispaniola have been noted in Campbell et al (2010) and can be linked to similar biases in the driving model (HadAM3P).…”

Modelling initial mortality of Abies religiosa in a crown fire in Mexico

“…Various global climate change predictions indicate drying trends for Mexico (Magaña et al, 1997;Villers-Ruiz & Trejo-Vazquez, 1997Karmalkar et al, 2011;Sáenz-Romero et al, 2012) with anticipated increases in fire, which could have a major impact on Monarch butterflies (Villers-Ruiz & TrejoVazquez, 1998;Peterson et al, 2002). Longer and stronger dry seasons (Karmalkar et al, 2011) coupled with the structural characteristics of sacred fir, leads to the conclusion that crown fires will become more common in sacred fir forests, as well as in adjacent forest types. In light of this situation, the silvicultural practices of pruning low branches to raise crown base height, thinning and managing forest fuels where they are excessive, including materials resulting from silvicultural treatments, are factors that can help to reduce the incidence of fires in the vicinity of sacred fir forests.…”

Socio-economic vulnerability to climate change in the central mountainous region of eastern Mexico

“…Crops will have to adapt to future conditions, and in this region vulnerability is enhanced because more than half of its population relies entirely on agriculture. Additionally, projected climatic changes can have detrimental impacts on biodiversity (Karmalkar et al 2011). Local climatic changes will affect natural ecosystems and crop production, and thus the local economy of a region already marginalized.…”