Climate change scenarios for impact assessment in Cuba

Abstract

Determining seasonal and regional patterns of climate change is in growing demand for the assessiment of the potential impacts on climate-related economic activities, such as agriculture or water resource management. This paper presents the results of the work done to determine possible patterns of CO 2 -induced climate change in Cuba based on the IPCC's best estimate of climate sensitivity and using IS92a and KYOTOA1 emission scenarios. The climate change scenarios were prepared combining general circulation model (GCM) results and output from the MAGICC climate model. The results of this study show that the methodology and the GCMs selected provide a large range of regional climate change and guarantee that the climatic change scenarios developed can be applied to explore a wide spectrum of the potential climate changes in different environments and social sectors in Cuba.