How Accurately Contemporary Models Can Predict Monsoons?

V Brahmananda Rao,Clovis M E Santo,Julio P R Fernandez,S S V S Ramakrishna,Sergio H Franchito

doi:10.4236/ajcc.2018.71008

Abstract

Seasonal changes exhibit climate changes, so models can predict future climate change accurately only if they can reproduce seasonal cycle accu-rately. Further, seasonal changes are much larger than the changes even in long period of centuries. Thus it is unwise to ignore large ones compared to small climate change. In this paper, we determine how accurately a suite of ten coupled general circulation models reproduce the observed seasonal cycle in rainfall of the tropics. The seasonal cycles in rainfall of global tropics are known as monsoons. We found that the models can reasonably reproduce the seasonal cycle in rainfall, thus are useful in climate prediction and simulation of global monsoons.

Highlights

Future climate change can be due to internal and external variability [1]
The root mean square (RMS) error, absolute error (ABSE) and the bias the models make with respect to observations in determining the amplitude and phase of the first four harmonics and mean annual rainfall are given Table 2, for the 10 models and model ensemble (MME)
Seasonal cycles in tropical precipitation are known as monsoons

Summary

Introduction

Future climate change can be due to internal and external variability [1]. In a recent study, [2] noted that the observed trends of climate change are very unlikely attributed to internal variability even if the contemporary climate models are found to underestimate it. The future projection of climate change obtained by state-of-art models may be uncertain mainly because of the difficulty in the determination of quantitative and spatial distribution of future greenhouse gases and other radiatively important external parameters.

Brahmananda Rao et al DOI

Data Sources

Results and Discussion

India Monsoon

South American Monsoon

Conclusions