Author(s): Yenny Marcela Toro Ortiz; Sonia Raquel Gamiz-Fortis; Yolanda Castro-Diez; Reiner Palomino-Lemus; Maria Jesus Esteban-Parra; Samir Cordoba-Machado

Linked Author(s): Yenny Marcela Toro Ortiz, Yolanda Castro-Díez

Keywords: Drought; Colombia; SPI; Decadal predictions; MIROC6; Statistical downscaling

Abstract: Drought is one of the natural hazards that generates important losses and damages in Colombia, with a strong economic impact on the country due to its development level. Added to this, there are very few indices that make it possible to monitor them in this region. Thus, various institutions are addressing short-term ten-year climate simulations using general circulation models (GCM), which consider the signal of change induced by the increase in greenhouse gases as well as the predictable signal provided by the initial conditions of the sea surface temperature (SST) in order to provide information to managers and responsible for water resources. This work studies the potential use of the decadal predictions of the MIROC6 model to predict drought events in Colombia through the analysis of its decadal hindcasts in the period 1960-2018. The choice of this model is based on its adequate capacity to reproduce the main modes of climate variability that affect the area under study. Drought events will be characterized by the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) on different time scales. Taking into account that the MIROC6 resolution not allow to solve local characteristics, such as topographic factors, land-water distribution or types of vegetation, etc., a statistical downscaling of the decadal hindcasts will be carried out for the precipitation, whose values will be used to compute the SPI. These results will be compared with those obtained from the observational database "Global Precipitation Climatology Center" (GPCC). Acknowledgments: Y.M. Toro-Ortiz acknowledges the Colombian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation for the predoctoral fellowship (grant code: 860). This research has been carried out in the framework of the projects CGL2017-89836-R, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness with additional FEDER funds, and B-RNM-336-UGR18, funded by FEDER / Junta de Andalucía - Ministry of Economy and Knowledge.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/IAHR-39WC2521711920221413

Year: 2022