Summer monsoon climate simulations over BIMSTEC countries using RegCM4 regional climate model

Abstract

Regional climate models are useful by downscaling from global climate model simulations for climate studies and climate applications at a regional scale. The South Asian monsoon region is one of the most challenging regions towards understanding the monsoon variability by implementing various climate simulations. A model version of the RegCM4 regional climate model provided by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) is used in this study to simulate the climate of Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) countries (India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka) during the periods 1985–2000, which shows the present-day climate simulations. The simulation is carried out with RegCM4.3 with the lateral boundary forcing provided by the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast Reanalysis (Era-Interim) at 25 km horizontal resolution. The convective scheme Grell with closures Arakawa–Schubert is investigated during the south-west monsoon seasons (June–September, JJAS). The results indicate that the JJAS surface mean temperature has a large cold bias of 2–\(6{^{\circ }}\hbox {C}\) over the coastal regions near India, Myanmar, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh when compared with the Climate Research Unit (CRU) observed dataset. The model is able to produce the spatial rainfall distribution pattern of the observed CRU and Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) averaged seasonal rainfall in most of the land regions over the BIMSTEC countries during this period, but with underestimation. Further, the south-westerly prevailing wind pattern at 850 hPa pressure level is also well captured by the model but with a higher intensity over Sri Lanka, Western India, Nepal and Thailand. The westerly is stronger over the Bay of Bengal in the model simulations than the observed Era-Reanalysis data sets obtained from ECMWF. Also, the model is able to capture the mean monsoon circulation features. This model may be used for a few of the BIMSTEC regions for climate study applications.