Supporting Science in the South

What would future scenarios of Mexican climate look like? Ramon Fuentes, doctoral student from CICESE (Centro de Investigación Científica y de Educación Superior de Ensenada), Mexico, has some answers. Fuentes is working on a project of climate projection coordinated by Filippo Giorgi, head of the Earth System Physics (ESP) section,  and ESP researcher Erika Coppola.

Fuentes' work focuses on Mexican climate projections up to 2100, using the RegCM regional climate model developed by Giorgi, to complete future climate simulations. He is currently at ICTP so that he can access RegCM and use ICTP's high-end server capabilities required to run the simulations and access data.

RegCM solves equations able to describe the movement and evolution of air masses and the energy transportation of these masses, according to the geophysical fluid dynamics theory (the study of flow of fluids and gases on Earth) and it is able to parameterize the interaction of land surface and  atmosphe (heat flow patterns, radiation, vegetation, etc.) to describe future climate scenarios. "Because the RegCM considers many variables, I am able to make thorough projections for the Mexican region," says Fuentes.

Coppola explained how climate projection works: "We use past climate data, say, from 1970 to the current year, to validate our regional model and then we use this model  to simulate  future climate according to the next IPCC scenarios."

Coppola and Fuentes say that they have been able to reproduce with the regional model the real distribution of precipitation and temperature conditions for Mexico for present day climate and to describe extreme climatic conditions such as cyclones and cyclone tracks that are crucial for the region.

Fuentes observed that modelling results for some regions are very precise while for some others the parameters needed to be adjusted. For example, he said that modelling the precipitation scenario for the Baja California region was more precise than that for the Yucatan region.

While Fuentes' work focuses on Mexico, the other researchers working on the climate projection project are carrying out analogous work for different regions in Africa, South East-Asia, South America and Europe, said Coppola. They use the climate model and servers housed at ICTP and a super-computer, Arctur ,based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, for numerical simulations.

Coppola and Fuentes aim to complete work by December 2012 so that the results can be included in the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.