Abstract
AbstractRepresenting the rainy season of the maritime continent is a challenge for global and regional climate models. Here, we compare regional climate models (RCMs) based on the coupled model intercomparison project phase 5 (CMIP5) model generation with high‐resolution global climate models with a comparable spatial resolution from the HighResMIP experiment. The onset and the total precipitation of the rainy season for both model experiments are compared against observational datasets for Southeast Asia. A realistic representation of the monsoon rainfall is essential for agriculture in Southeast Asia as a delayed onset jeopardizes the possibility of having three annual crops. In general, the coupled historical runs (Hist‐1950) and the historical force atmosphere run (HighresSST) of the high‐resolution model intercomparison project (HighResMIP) suite were consistently closer to the observations than the RCM of CMIP5 used in this study. We find that for the whole of Southeast Asia, the HighResMIP models simulate the onset date and the total precipitation of the rainy season over the region closer to the observations than the other model sets used in this study. High‐resolution models in the HighresSST experiment showed a similar performance to their low‐resolution equivalents in simulating the monsoon characteristics. The HighresSST experiment simulated the anomaly of the onset date and the total precipitation for different El Niño‐southern oscillation conditions best, although the magnitude of the onset date anomaly was underestimated.
Highlights
Global climate models (GCMs) are the primary tools used to assess the impact of climate change
In terms of the standard deviation (SD) value, we find that the HighResMIP and a single coupled model intercomparison project phase 5 (CMIP5) model show SD values to be closer to observations as compared to the coordinated downscaling experiment (CORDEX) models
The performances of CORDEX and HighResMIP climate models on simulating the rainy season over the Southeast Asia (SEA) region are investigated using the onset of the rainy season as the principal metric
Summary
Global climate models (GCMs) are the primary tools used to assess the impact of climate change. The spatial resolution of the models is one of the limitations that leads to a poor representation of the hydrologic cycle in GCMs as many of the processes contributing to the hydrologic cycle need to be resolved through parameterization schemes, such as convection With this limitation, the assessment of future climate change impacts over Southeast Asia (SEA) is challenging since this region has unique physiogeographical characteristics (Ul Hasson et al, 2016). The region with the most realistic SST values had the smallest bias Motivated by these results, follow-up research was conducted using long-term high-resolution (HR) coupled climate model simulations (Aldrian et al, 2005). Compared to the previous research that used the uncoupled model, the HR coupled model has accurately simulated rainfall over the region
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