Preliminary Results from “La Florida” - A Land of Flowers on a Latitude of Deserts

In this project we down-scaled three global climate models to a regional scale for the southeast United States.  The three GCMs were the Community Climate System Model v3.0, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Model v2.1 and the Hadley Center Climate Model v3.0.  We used the Regional Spectral Model to dynamically down scale to approximately 10 x 10 km spatial resolution.  Down scaled climate model outputs include temperature and precipitation at hourly time steps. We validated the down scaling by comparing our results with both station and gridded observational data. For precipitation, we had good agreement in both the seasonal distribution and diurnal patterns.  The down scaling also accurately reproduced the observed patterns in sea breezes over peninsular Florida.  Given the success in down scaling, we then produced “future casts” for the southeast U.S. for the period 2040 – 2070.  Our future casts indicate a hotter and possibly dryer southeast United States. These climate future casts are being used by ecologists in a variety of models to examine potential impacts on organisms to ecosystems. These include the Florida manatee, Snail kites, American crocodile, and Key deer.  The data are also being used to examine the potential expansion of mangrove forests northward where they may replace salt marshes.  Our results indicate possible northward range expansions by Florida’s tropical species.