REGIONAL-ANALYSIS OF CLIMATIC SIMULATIONS OF THE CANADIAN GENERAL-CIRCULATION MODEL FOR THE TERRITORY OF QUEBEC

Current understanding of the possible nature of climatic change al the regional scale is limited by the spatial resolution of General Circulation Models (GCM). The use of GCM outputs without correction linked to the spatial variability of the variables can bring significant errors in their utilization at the regional scale. The potential of the Canadian GCM for regional applications in Quebec has been analysed by comparison to the climatic normals of temperature and precipitation, measured over the Quebec climatological network, on an annual and seasonal basis. This analysis has been undertaken with the support of a geographical information system (GIS) (PAMAP). in summary, a difference between the climatic normal and the GCM output has been estimated at 20% for temperature and 30% for precipitation. We present an analysis of a corrected regionalized scenario for the province of Quebec of the possible climatic change simulated by the Canadian GCM under the hypothesis of a doubling of atmospheric CO2. Results show an increase of the annual average temperature of 4 degrees C for summer and 6 degrees C for winter, associated with an average increase of 80 mm (10%) in annual precipitation, reaching 25% in some regions.