Climate Variability and Change in Brazil

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Meteorology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (26 January 2024) | Viewed by 9006

Special Issue Editors

Department of Agricultural Engineering, Federal University of Viçosa, Viçosa 36570-900, MG, Brazil
Interests: ENSO; climate extremes; climate changes; oceanic heat waves
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Instituto de Recursos Naturais (IRN), Universidade Federal de Itajubá, Itajubá 37500-903, MG, Brazil
Interests: climatology; numerical modeling of weather and climate; climate change and impact; adaptation and vulnerability analysis

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Brazil has experienced several problems related to climate variability and change in all sorts of sectors, such as agriculture, health and infrastructure. Despite the number of studies focusing on climatological conditions, many issues are still overlooked about the dynamics, predictability, and climate projections of the influence of the water transport from oceanic regions in monsoonal characteristics, for instance. In short time scales, it is also very clear that the number and intensity of extreme events have increased substantially causing economic problems and threatening the livelihood of people. The goal of this Special Issue is to compile state-of-the-art studies on climate mechanisms responsible for changing climate and weather features in Brazil. Moreover, investigations related to the impact of anomalous climate in agriculture, soil moisture, landslides, energy, health and wildfires are of special interest. Studies can be based on observations, modelling, and remote sensing.

Prof. Dr. Flávio Justino
Prof. Dr. Roger Rodrigues Torres
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Atmosphere is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • monsoon
  • atmospheric dynamics
  • air–sea interaction
  • climate change
  • climate modeling
  • climate impact

Published Papers (5 papers)

Order results
Result details
Select all
Export citation of selected articles as:

Research

23 pages, 9047 KiB  
Article
Flash Drought and Its Characteristics in Northeastern South America during 2004–2022 Using Satellite-Based Products
by Humberto Alves Barbosa
Atmosphere 2023, 14(11), 1629; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14111629 - 30 Oct 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2194
Abstract
The term flash drought describes a special category of drought with rapid onset and strong intensity over the course of days or weeks. To characterize the impact of flash droughts on vegetation coverage, this study assessed the influence of soil water deficits on [...] Read more.
The term flash drought describes a special category of drought with rapid onset and strong intensity over the course of days or weeks. To characterize the impact of flash droughts on vegetation coverage, this study assessed the influence of soil water deficits on vegetation dynamics in the northeastern South America region by combining time series of vegetation index, rainfall, and soil moisture based on satellite products at a daily time scale. An 18-year analysis, from 2004 to 2022, of the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Standard Precipitation Index (SPI), and surface soil moisture (SSM) was performed based on three different satellite remote sensing estimates: the spinning enhanced visible and infrared imager (SEVIRI) and the integrated multi-satellite retrievals algorithm (IMERG), and the soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS). The results revealed that flash drought events exerted dramatic impacts on terrestrial ecosystems in the study region during the first two decades of the 2000s, with changes in seasonal and regional vegetation dynamics. Further, the fixed-threshold values to characterize flash drought events were suggested as the timing when the water deficit was less than −1.0 units and vegetation index reached the value equal to +0.3 during five consecutive weeks or more, coupled with soil moisture rates below 40% percentile, leading to a strong region-wide drought throughout the entire region. Additionally, the results of linear least squares trend analyses revealed a negative trend in the pentad-SEVIRI radiance for the solar channel 1 within the semiarid ecosystems of the study region (i.e., the Caatinga biome) that was suggested as a reduction in clouds in the 18 years of the study. Developing combined threshold measures of flash drought based on satellite remote sensing may lead to an accurate assessment of flash drought mitigation. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Variability and Change in Brazil)
Show Figures

Figure 1

21 pages, 1606 KiB  
Article
The Response of Southwest Atlantic Storm Tracks to Climate Change in the Brazilian Earth System Model
by Juliana Damasceno Dos Santos, Jeferson Prietsch Machado and Jaci Maria Bilhalva Saraiva
Atmosphere 2023, 14(7), 1055; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14071055 - 21 Jun 2023
Viewed by 834
Abstract
The Earth’s weather and climate are strongly influenced by synoptic-scale systems such as extratropical cyclones. From this point of view, extratropical cyclones are very important for Equator–Pole heat exchange, and their positions are relevant to the understanding of the behavior of this system [...] Read more.
The Earth’s weather and climate are strongly influenced by synoptic-scale systems such as extratropical cyclones. From this point of view, extratropical cyclones are very important for Equator–Pole heat exchange, and their positions are relevant to the understanding of the behavior of this system under current conditions and in the context of climate change. Baroclinic instability (BI), meridional heat flux (MHF), and kinetic energy (KE) are among the ways of calculating storm tracks (the regions in which extratropical cyclones most often occur). Forecasting is important for predicting the evolution of these phenomena and preparing future political decisions. In this study, we used ERA5 reanalysis data and BESM model forecasts to calculate BI, MHF, and KE. Overestimation of the BESM BI at lower and higher latitudes and underestimation of BI at medium latitudes were observed. In general, KE and MHF were underestimated and were displaced southward in the BESM. The analyses show a tendency towards poleward displacement of these tracks for all variables studied in in this paper. The scenarios show the same bias, with RCP8.5 having more extreme changes in all situations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Variability and Change in Brazil)
Show Figures

Figure 1

27 pages, 15377 KiB  
Article
Past and Future Responses of Soil Water to Climate Change in Tropical and Subtropical Rainforest Systems in South America
by Santiago M. Márquez Arévalo, Rafael Coll Delgado, Douglas da Silva Lindemann, Yuri A. Gelsleichter, Marcos Gervasio Pereira, Rafael de Ávila Rodrigues, Flávio Barbosa Justino, Henderson Silva Wanderley, Everaldo Zonta, Romário Oliveira de Santana and Renato Sinquini de Souza
Atmosphere 2023, 14(4), 755; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14040755 - 21 Apr 2023
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 1695
Abstract
The present study aimed to contribute to the diagnosis and advance the knowledge of the impacts of land use change and climate change on the tropical longleaf forest biome at the continental scale in South America (Biome 1 according to the WWF classification) [...] Read more.
The present study aimed to contribute to the diagnosis and advance the knowledge of the impacts of land use change and climate change on the tropical longleaf forest biome at the continental scale in South America (Biome 1 according to the WWF classification) for realizing scientific progress in the search for convincing strategies and actions by different actors for the preservation of forests in the continent. The status and climate of the area, which harbors the tropical longleaf forests of South America, were assessed. Moreover, volumetric soil moisture (VSM) was evaluated through maps and simulation using the autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA). Furthermore, future climate scenarios were predicted based on El Niño–Southern Oscillation phenomena, meteorological systems, and scientific evidence, such as the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) and sociopolitical dynamics evident in the region from the case analysis of the Brazilian states of Acre and Rio de Janeiro. An increase was noted in the temperature and range of precipitation variation in the biome. ARIMA analysis indicated changes of up to 0.24 m3 m−3 and an increased range of future VSM values. The December–January–February (DJF) quarter recorded the highest VSM median with the measurement scale of 0.05 to 0.44 m3 m−3, while the June–July–August (JJA) quarter recorded the lowest value. The regions of the biome with the lowest VSM values included southern Amazon (Ecuador, Peru, and the Brazilian states of Acre, Mato Grosso, Pará, and Maranhão), Brazilian Atlantic Forest, Southeast Region, and the Brazilian state of Bahia. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Variability and Change in Brazil)
Show Figures

Figure 1

22 pages, 2865 KiB  
Article
Spatiotemporal Analysis of Extreme Rainfall Frequency in the Northeast Region of Brazil
by Fidel Ernesto Castro Morales, Daniele Torres Rodrigues, Thiago Valentim Marques, Ana Cleide Bezerra Amorim, Priscilla Teles de Oliveira, Claudio Moises Santos e Silva, Weber Andrade Gonçalves and Paulo Sergio Lucio
Atmosphere 2023, 14(3), 531; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos14030531 - 09 Mar 2023
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1706
Abstract
Climate extreme events are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide, causing floods, drought, forest fires, landslides and heat or cold waves. Several studies have been developed on the assessment of trends in the occurrence of extreme events. However, most of these studies used traditional models, [...] Read more.
Climate extreme events are becoming increasingly frequent worldwide, causing floods, drought, forest fires, landslides and heat or cold waves. Several studies have been developed on the assessment of trends in the occurrence of extreme events. However, most of these studies used traditional models, such as Poisson or negative binomial models. Thus, the main objective of this study is to use a space–time data counting approach in the modeling of the number of days with extreme precipitation as an alternative to the commonly used statistical methods. The study area is the Northeast Brazil region, and the analysis was carried out for the period between 1 January 1980 and 31 December 2010, by assessing the frequency of extreme precipitation represented by the R10 mm, R20 mm and R* indices. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Variability and Change in Brazil)
Show Figures

Figure 1

23 pages, 8806 KiB  
Article
Evaluation of Atmospheric Features in Natural Disasters due Frontal Systems over Southern Brazil
by Jean Souza dos Reis, Weber Andrade Gonçalves, Diego Oliveira de Souza and David Mendes
Atmosphere 2022, 13(11), 1886; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13111886 - 11 Nov 2022
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1427
Abstract
This study evaluated the atmospheric pattern precursors to the occurrence of natural disasters (ND) in the southern region of Brazil (SRB) due to the passage of frontal systems (FS). The results can be used as prognostics to assist in risk management with a [...] Read more.
This study evaluated the atmospheric pattern precursors to the occurrence of natural disasters (ND) in the southern region of Brazil (SRB) due to the passage of frontal systems (FS). The results can be used as prognostics to assist in risk management with a set of preventive and mitigating actions in order to minimize the impact of natural disasters suffered by the population. The natural disasters data were provided by the Centro de monitoramento e alertas de desastres naturais (Cemaden). For atmospheric analysis we used ERA5 reanalysis data, and the precipitation dataset was estimated from Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) from the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission. The most affected regions are the coast of Santa Catarina and the central-eastern region of Rio Grande do Sul. The results indicate that FS associated with ND are different from the other FS that affect the SRB. The observations were: a pattern of increase and accumulation of available convective potential energy west of the SRB before the event, especially in spring; a considerable increase in specific humidity at low levels associated with runoff east of the Andes; and an anticyclonic circulation at high levels similar to the Bolivian High. Analysis of rainfall behavior indicates that it is highest in the two days preceding the disaster. The mean precipitation values identified, together with atmospheric behavior observed in this study, allow us to identify the potential occurrence of a disaster in the cities of SRB in the passage of a frontal system. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Climate Variability and Change in Brazil)
Show Figures

Figure 1

Back to TopTop