Second year report of the project CRN-2094 The Impact of Land Cover and Land Use Changes on the Hydroclimate of the La Plata Basin

The report details the second year of project CRN-2094, which investigates how land cover and land use changes (LCLUC) affect the hydroclimate and extreme weather events in the La Plata Basin. Key activities include the development of a Land Data Assimilation System, the use of Ecosystem Functional Types (EFTs) to improve regional climate models, and the implementation of agricultural monitoring tools in Paraguay.

• The project is replacing traditional static land-cover classifications in regional models with time-varying Ecosystem Functional Types (EFTs) to better represent rapid environmental changes like fires, floods, and droughts. Using EFTs in the WRF regional model showed that high productivity and weak seasonal cycles can increase near-surface temperatures by up to 1°C in the central and western La Plata Basin during spring.
• A control run of a South American Land Data Assimilation System (SALDAS) was generated from 1979 to 2004 using the Noah LSM and MERRA atmospheric forcing at a 10km spatial resolution. Comparisons revealed that the land surface model partitions water differently depending on the atmospheric forcing source, with NOAH-MERRA producing low runoff and baseflow values.
• An evaluation of six atmospheric reanalyses for precipitation over South America found that the CFSR dataset presents the smallest biases, likely due to the assimilation of GLDAS products. Most reanalyses showed correlation coefficients below 0.6 compared to observation-based products, though CFSR performed better.
• Evapotranspiration over the La Plata Basin was estimated using the Penman-Monteith method combined with MODIS sensor leaf area index (LAI) data. The results demonstrated that using LAI data satisfactorily reproduced both the spatial and seasonal variations of evapotranspiration.
• Preliminary research into the impacts of Amazonian deforestation on the La Plata Basin water balance led to the selection of the NCEP-3 reanalysis over MERRA for rainfall variables. Validation for the 1999-2008 period showed NCEP-3 had a lower mean error (279.5 mm/yr) compared to MERRA (535.9 mm/yr).
• The agricultural component of the project is establishing a weather monitoring network in Paraguay, with 20 stations planned, 17 of which will be in Eastern Paraguay. This network, funded by the Federation of Cooperatives, aims to support a web-based decision support system and drought monitoring.

APA

Berbery, E. H., de Goncalves, L. G., Herdies, D., Kalnay, E., Lettenmaier, D., Nuñez, M., Paruelo, J., & Dias, P. S. (2010). Second year report of the project CRN-2094 The Impact of Land Cover and Land Use Changes on the Hydroclimate of the La Plata Basin. Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. https://iai.int/admin/site/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/03/Final_report_IDRC_Berbery.pdf

Chicago

Berbery, Ernesto Hugo, Luis Gustavo de Goncalves, Dirceu Herdies, Eugenia Kalnay, Dennis Lettenmaier, Mario Nuñez, Jose Paruelo, and Pedro Silva Dias. Second year report of the project CRN-2094 The Impact of Land Cover and Land Use Changes on the Hydroclimate of the La Plata Basin. Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, 2010. https://iai.int/admin/site/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/03/Final_report_IDRC_Berbery.pdf.

Wikipedia

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BibTeX

@techreport{berbery2010second, author = {Berbery, Ernesto Hugo and de Goncalves, Luis Gustavo and Herdies, Dirceu and Kalnay, Eugenia and Lettenmaier, Dennis and Nuñez, Mario and Paruelo, Jose and Dias, Pedro Silva}, title = {{Second year report of the project CRN-2094 The Impact of Land Cover and Land Use Changes on the Hydroclimate of the La Plata Basin}}, institution = {Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research}, year = {2010}, url = {https://iai.int/admin/site/sites/default/files/uploads/2014/03/Final_report_IDRC_Berbery.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }