HR: 1340h
AN: A53B-0883    [Abstracts]
TI: Future Changes in Extreme Events in the Western United States
AU: * Bell, J L
EM: jbell@es.ucsc.edu
AF: University of California Santa Cruz, Department of Earth Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 United States
AU: Sloan, L C
EM: lcsloan@es.ucsc.edu
AF: University of California Santa Cruz, Department of Earth Sciences, Santa Cruz, CA 95064 United States
AB: Extreme temperatures and rainfall can have severe impacts on agriculture, human health and water availability. Projections of future extreme events are generally based on past climate records or modeling studies that are either too coarse or too short to be effective. Unfortunately temperature records indicate rapid changes in climate over the period for which global records have been kept. Furthermore precipitation is highly variable and difficult to predict and to model. Therefore projections based on these methods are less than ideal. Here we present results of long regional model simulations (50 years) to address potential future changes in extreme climate events. The advantage of this approach is that the events are explicitly modeled at high resolution allowing for significance testing of the results.
DE: 9350 North America
DE: 3329 Mesoscale meteorology
DE: 4215 Climate and interannual variability (3309)
DE: 4227 Diurnal, seasonal, and annual cycles
DE: 1836 Hydrologic budget (1655)
SC: Atmospheric Sciences [A]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting