Evaluation of the capability of RegCM4.0 in simulating East African climate

Abstract

The International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) regional climate model RegCM4.0 is used in this study to examine its ability to reproduce the climate of East Africa (EA) in regard to the annual cycle and June-to-August (JJA) seasonal climatology. Two domain sizes (large domain (LD) and small domain (SD)) and two cumulus convection schemes (Grell convection scheme with Fritsch-Chappell closure as- sumption (GRE scheme) and MIT scheme (EMA scheme)) are used. Simulations were done for the period 1989-2008 at a resolution of 50 km. The experiments were performed with the initial and lateral boundary conditions obtained from ERA- Interim-gridded reanalysis data at a 1.5° resolution. The vari- ables investigated are precipitation, temperature, humidity, diur- nal temperature range, and 850-hPa winds. Results show that the model realistically reproduces the East African climate, with a few discrepancies due to the different cumulus convection schemes and the domain sizes used. Grell with Fritsch- Chappell (Grell-FC) scheme captures well the observed climate in regard to the annual cycle and June-to-August seasonal cli- matology, with a tendency to underestimate rainfall over the JJA rainfall maximum region (RMR). This scheme performs better in LD than in SD. EMA scheme similarly captures well the observed climatology. It tends to overestimate rainfall over RMR. It however performs better in SD than in LD. The ensem- ble mean of simulations with GRE and EMA schemes (ENSM) tends to offer an improved representation of the observed climate, with a few discrepancies owing to the individual schemes used. In general, therefore,considering the performance of the model in both domains, the East African climate based on this study is better simulated by the Grell-FC scheme over LD. The observed biases in this study signify that the ability of the model in simulating climate over East Africa is still a significant challenge. Thus, future work must focus on improving the performance of the model in climate research over the region.