Climate Change’s Impacts in a Watershed in the South of the Minas Gerais State

Abstract

Climate change in the 21st century is an undisputed reality. Several effects and impacts have been registered in society in several regions of the planet. This work objective is to evaluate an association of the hydrological model MHD-INPE with the atmospheric model Eta/CPTEC to simulate the impact of climate change in the Jaguara Creek Basin, located in the south of the state of Minas Gerais. For this purpose, two scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) of three global climatic models downscaled by the Eta model (HadGEM2-ES, MIROC5 and CanESM2) were used. The results of the calibration and validation shows a good performance of the MHD-INPE model in simulating the JCR daily discharge. The results of the scenarios were used as input to the MHD-INPE model after bias correction. Regarding the corrected climate projections, they resulted in a predominant reduction of the rainfall throughout the 21st century. The results of the projections of temperature showed an increase through the climatic models in both scenarios. The statistical of the flow duration curve (FDC) resulting from the simulations of the Eta model showed a good performance of the MHD-INPE in the simulation of the baseline period.