Journal of Earth Science & Climatic Change
Open Access

Research Article

Climate Change in Chile: An Analysis of State-of-the-Art Observations, Satellite-Derived Estimates and Climate Model Simulations

Charles JR Williams^*

Department of Meteorology, Room 2U18, Walker Institute, University of Reading, Earley Gate, UK

*Corresponding Author:

Charles JR Williams
Department of Meteorology
Room 2U18, Walker Institute
University of Reading, Earley Gate, UK
Tel: +44 0118 378 5586
E-mail: C.J.R.Williams@reading.ac.uk

Received Date: November 22, 2016; Accepted Date: May 02, 2017; Published Date: May 08, 2017

Citation: Williams CJR (2017) Climate Change in Chile: An Analysis of State-ofthe- Art Observations, Satellite-Derived Estimates and Climate Model Simulations. J Earth Sci Clim Change 8:400. doi: 10.4172/2157-7617.1000400

Copyright: © 2017 Williams CJR. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Although there is a reasonably large body of work focusing on South American climate, few studies focus on just Chile and even fewer consider climate processes operating over longer timescales, such as those at which climate change becomes apparent.

This paper provides an overview of Chilean present-day and future climate, needed to plan for potential impacts of climate change. Firstly, present-day climate conditions are assessed using a number of observational rainfall and temperature datasets. All available GCMs are then examined, to firstly assess their ability to simulate climate during the end of the 20^th century and secondly to examine their projections during the 21^st century.

The results of the present day analysis show a showing general agreement in spatial and temporal patterns of rainfall and temperature, between the datasets. When assessing the models’ ability to simulate observed rainfall and temperature, the results suggest that although the majority captures the spatial and temporal patterns, there are significant differences between models. When assessing future projections, the results suggest that over the next ~30 years, most GCMs show either no change in rainfall or a small reduction; however there is a lack of agreement regarding the sign of change, suggesting high uncertainty. For temperature, most models agree on a warming trend. This is also true for the longer-term, with most GCMs suggesting a small rainfall decrease by 2100 but a large temperature increase. Lastly, it is suggested that this temperature increase is due to an increase in minimum temperatures, which may have implications for certain frost-sensitive crops.

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