Abstract
Climate model evaluation presents a crucial pathway into the investigation of the simulation of future climate. It presents the only lens through which the future states of the climate of the planet can be explored. In this study, reference datasets including reanalysis products have been used to demonstrate the climatological annual migration of the West African Monsoon System (WAMS) in three components, namely, the West African Heat Low (WAHL), the West African Heat Band (WAHB) and the West African Rain Band (WARB). We have used 8 Global Climate Models (GCMs) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) to assess how the models represent the climatological annual migration of these three features over the same domain for the same period. The results show close linkages between the WAHL, WAHB and the WARB as signature components of the WAMS in their climatological annual dynamics. All three features migrate from the south (with the minimum intensities) in January to the north (with the maximum intensities) in August over the region. The GCMs represent the climatological annual dynamics of all three features to some extent. However, in most of the models analysed the WAHL is too weak, and the WAHB and WARB are located too far south. Insights from this study can be beneficial for investigations of the future state of the WAMS. Also, development of models for the region should target the improved simulation of these features, specifically the intensity of the WAHL, and the locations of the WAHB and WARB.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Climate Dynamics |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Accepted/In press - 7 Sept 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work has been conducted for the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)-funded LaunchPAD (Priority on African Diagnostics) project, part of the Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) program (futureclimateafrica.org). We gratefully acknowledge the funding of this work. The authors are thankful to the staff members of the JASMIN High Performance Computing System for making this system available for data access and analysis. We acknowledge the usefulness of the all the reference datasets including ERA-Interim and ERA5 from the ECMWF, MERRA2 from NASA, and the producers of the GPCP data. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme, which, through its Working Group on Coupled Modelling, coordinated and promoted CMIP6. We thank the climate modeling groups for producing and making available their model output, the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) for archiving the data and providing access, and the multiple funding agencies who support CMIP6 and ESGF.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s).
Keywords
- Climate models
- Climatology
- CMIP6
- Heat low
- Process-based evaluation
- Rain band
- West Africa
