The impact of regional climate model formulation and resolution on simulated precipitation in Africa

Wu, Minchao; Nikulin, Grigory; Kjellström, Erik; Belušić, Danijel; Jones, Colin; Lindstedt, David

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-11-377-2020

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-11-377-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-11-377-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 2

Research article

|

29 Apr 2020

Research article |

| 29 Apr 2020

The impact of regional climate model formulation and resolution on simulated precipitation in Africa

Minchao Wu, Grigory Nikulin, Erik Kjellström, Danijel Belušić, Colin Jones, and David Lindstedt

Data sets

ECMWF Re-Analysis datasets European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) https://apps.ecmwf.int/datasets/

GPCC Landsurface Monitoring Monthly Product Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) https://www.dwd.de/EN/ourservices/gpcc/gpcc.html

Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Time-Series (TS) Version 3.23 of High Resolution Gridded Data of Month-by-month Variation in Climate University of East Anglia (UEA) https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/5dca9487dc614711a3a933e44a933ad3

Terrestrial Air Temperature and Precipitation: Monthly Climatologies (V 4.01) University of Delaware http://climate.geog.udel.edu/~climate/html_pages/download.html

The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) Multi-satellite Precipitation Analysis Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) https://pmm.nasa.gov/data-access/downloads/trmm

Short summary

Regional Climate Models constitute a downscaling tool to provide high-resolution data for impact and adaptation studies. However, there is no unique definition of the added value of downscaling as it depends on many factors. We investigate the impact of spatial resolution and model formulation on downscaled rainfall in Africa. Our results show that improvements in downscaled rainfall compared to the driving reanalysis are often related to model formulation and not always to higher resolution.