Climate Change Impacts on Precipitation in Arid Regions: An Arizona Case Study
Abstract
Climate change comes with an increase in temperature across the globe. This temperature increase will be changing the precipitation spatial and temporal distribution as well as its intensity and frequency impacting the available water resources. Arid and semi-arid areas such as the southwestern United States already suffer from water scarcity and climate change imposes additional stress on these regions. A better understanding of the long-term impacts of climate change on precipitation is fundamental to have sustainable water management and to ensure the availability of water for future generations.
In this research, a Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) climate model was developed to study the change in intensity, frequency, and distribution of future precipitation events in the state of Arizona, USA. The model was first validated against the historical precipitation data (2010-2017) from weather stations across the state of Arizona. Later, the same model was adopted to simulate future precipitation up to the year 2100. Future precipitation was simulated using three different climate scenarios, consistent with the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) as I) RCP 4.5, low to moderate emission scenario with greenhouse gas radiative forcing reaching 4.5 Wm-2, II) RCP 6, moderate greenhouse gas emission, and III) RCP 8.5, high emission scenario with greenhouse gas radiative forcing reaching 8.5 Wm-2. The adopted fuzzy scenarios enabled us to analyze the changing precipitation patterns resulting from varying emission rates. Accordingly, seasonal variations and average annual precipitation can be estimated in the best case, most likely case, and worst case future climate scenarios.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFM.H43H2551M
- Keywords:
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- 1616 Climate variability;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1854 Precipitation;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 1869 Stochastic hydrology;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 4333 Disaster risk analysis and assessment;
- NATURAL HAZARDS