EVALUATION OF THE CORDEX-SEA MODELS PERFORMANCE IN SIMULATING CHARACTERISTICS OF WET SEASON IN INDONESIA

Abstract

Indonesia's climate is known to be challenging to adequately simulate by climate models because of the complexity of the weather system and sea-land distribution. Model evaluation is essential to measure confidence in the model results. This study evaluates the performance of the CORDEX-SEA model in simulating monthly rainfall patterns and the characteristics of seasonal rainfall, i.e., pattern, timing, length, and intensity, in Indonesia during 1986-2005. The performance of weighted (WMME) and unweighted ensemble methods are also calculated. Corrected CHIRPS data with similar seasonal patterns with point observation data is used as reference data to evaluate models. Percentage of the agreement of seasonal patterns between models and observation, FAR, and POD values were used to assess the model's ability to simulate seasonal patterns. WMME has the best seasonal patterns agreement with observation, 67% of all grids. The best model performance is shown by monsoonal patterns, with a POD value of 83% by WMME. Otherwise, all models could not describe an anti-monsoonal pattern, with a small POD (0-33%) and a high FAR (60-100%). In simulating the wet season on climatological, annual, and annual mean scales, both MMEs have similar performance and are better than individual models, with WMME performing best. However, on an annual scale, the yearly wet season produced by all models tends to approach its climatology value, making it less reliable in extreme years. Most models have higher daily and monthly rainfall than observation. In conclusion, the weighted ensemble method describes Indonesia's rainy season well, thus providing a reasonable basis for further research in climate projection analysis.