Spatial distribution of precipitation annual cycles over South Africa in 10 CORDEX regional climate model present-day simulations.

This study presents an evaluation of the ability of 10 regional climate models (RCMs) participating in the Coordinated Regional climate Downscaling Experiment – Africa (CORDEX-Africa) to reproduce the present-day spatial distribution of annual cycles of precipitation over the South African sector. As found in previous studies, annual mean precipitation is quasi-systematically overestimated by the RCMs over a large part of southern Africa south of about 20°S and more strongly over South Africa. The spatial analysis of precipitation over the studied region shows that in most models the distribution of biases appears to be linked to orography. Wet biases are quasi-systematic in regions with higher elevation with inversely neutral to dry biases particularly in the coastal fringes. This spatial pattern of biases is particularly obvious during summer and specifically atthe beginning of the rainy season (November and December) when the wet biases are found to be the strongest across all models.Applying a k-means algorithm, a classification of annual cycles is performed using observed precipitation data, and is compared with those derived from modeled data. It isfound that the in-homogeneity of the spatial and temporal distribution of biases tends toimpact the modeled seasonality of precipitation. Generally, the pattern of rainfall seasonality in the ensemble mean of the 10 RCMs tends to be shifted to the southwest. This spatial shift is mainly linked to a strong overestimation of convective precipitation at the beginning of the rainy season over the plateau inducing an early annual peak and to an underestimation of stratiform rainfall in winter and spring over southwestern South Africa.Finally, most RCMs and their ensemble mean perform poorer than ERA-Interim (the forcing data) in simulating the spatial distribution of 1- the annual mean precipitation and 2-the phasing of annual cycles of precipitation, over the region of South Africa.

FAVRE Alice;  PHILIPPON Nathalie;  POHL Benjamin;  KALOGNOMOU Evangelia-Anna;  LENNARD Christopher;  HEWITSON Bruce;  NIKULIN Grigory;  DOSIO Alessandro;  PANITZ Hans-Juergen;  CEREZO-MOTA Ruth; 

2015-07-14

SPRINGER

JRC95470

0930-7575,   

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-015-2677-z,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC95470,   

10.1007/s00382-015-2677-z,