Precipitation Controls in Southern Mexico

Abstract

while climatology as a discipline covers a host of applications in all regions of the globe, perhaps one of the more critical issues of today relates to climatic change in lowlatitude Third World countries. The local precipitation in these regions results largely from small-scale convective features embedded in large-scale phenomena such as the monsoon circulation, the Walker Circulation, and the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Thus, precipitation at the local scale is difficult to both understand and predict, moreover it occurs in regions where people are highly vulnerable to the impact of changing climate and current climate variability. In dealing with such issues, one of the more difficult aspects is to translate from the large-scale processes such as the ITCZ (the levels at which climate processes are best understood), to the smaller scale of immediate human impact. Of particular importance is the problem of translating modeled global changes as a consequence of greenhouse warming down to the local and regional scale.