An assessment of CSIRO Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model simulations over Sri Lanka

Abstract

In this study, we present an assessment of the Conformal Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM) 50 km simulations forced by the sea surface temperature and sea ice concentration of six global climate models (GCMs) (ACCESS1-0, CCSM4, GFDL-CM3, NorESM, MPI-ESM and CNRM-CM5) from the Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) over South Asia, centred on Sri Lanka. The model simulations were compared with the data provided by the Asian Precipitation Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration towards Evaluation of Water Resource (APHRODITE) project and ERA-Interim from the European Centre for Medium range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) over a broad region centred on Sri Lanka. This broad region includes South Asia and northern Indian Ocean. Statistical measures such as pattern correlations, mean biases and root mean square errors were calculated separately for the four seasons. Results based on statistical tests indicate that the current CCAM simulations capture the spatial patterns of 10 m wind speed, mean sea level pressure, temperature and rainfall over a broad region over South Asia fairly well. The annual cycles of temperature and rainfall were also compared against observations over the northern and southern regions of Sri Lanka by taking the field average of each model and the observed data. The characteristics of the observed annual variations of rainfall and temperature over the smaller domains are not very well captured by the CCAM simulations. There are differences in the magnitudes of the temperature and rainfall in the six member CCAM simulations. Comparatively, the two CCAM simulations CNRM-CM5 and GFDL-CM3 show slightly better agreement over the Sri Lankan region.