Climate Change Projections for Central America
"Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger"
- Alan Pounds, Ecologist, Cloud Forest Lab, Monteverde, Costa Rica.
This is precisely the motivation of my Ph.D. dissertation project. It has been shown that climate change is a cause of decline and migration of species in the forests of Central America. Understanding impacts of climate change in mountainous regions, at spatial scales relevant for impacts assessment, is an important issue.
To simulate climate change in Central America, I have used the Hadley Center regional climate model PRECIS. This model is driven at the boundaries by HadAM3P and the SSTs. I am studying two experiements: a control run (1960-1990) and SRES A2 (2070-2100) run, both carried out at 25-km resolution. For more information on PRECIS, please visit the following links:
PRECIS website: http://precis.metoffice.com/
PRECIS Handbook: http://precis.metoffice.com/docs/PRECIS_Handbook.pdf