Simulation of temperature and precipitation climatology for the CORDEX-MENA/Arab domain using RegCM4
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Simulation of temperature and precipitation climatology for the CORDEX-MENA/Arab domain using RegCM4 Mansour Almazroui 1 & M. Nazrul Islam 1 & A. K. Alkhalaf 1 & Fahad Saeed 1,2 & Ramzah Dambul 1 & M. Ashfaqur Rahman 1
Received: 13 February 2015 / Accepted: 10 September 2015 / Published online: 8 December 2015 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2015
Abstract The performance of a regional climate model RegCM4.3.4 (RegCM4) in simulating the climate characteristics of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has been evaluated. The simulations carried out in this study contribute to the joint effort by the international regional downscaling community called Coordinated Regional climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX). The model has been forced with the boundary conditions obtained from the global reanalysis dataset ERA-Interim for the period 1979–2010. An east–west cold bias is found in the northern part of the MENA domain in RegCM4 that is absent in the ERA-Interim driving forcings, whereas a large warm bias is found over the southern Arabian Peninsula (Yemen/Oman) for both RegCM4 and ERA-Interim. The possible causes leading to the warm bias over Yemen/Oman in the RegCM4 are discussed. The model performed well in capturing the salient features of precipitation which includes ITCZ, Mediterranean cyclones as well as precipitation minima over the deserts. Moreover, the annual cycles of precipitation and mean temperature over the prominent river basins of the region have been ably captured by the model. Temperature-precipitation relationship revealed that the ERA-Interim driving forcings stay closer to the observations; however, RegCM4 remains competent for most of the Koppen-Geiger climate classification types. Performance of the model in capturing the near surface winds and specific humidity is also presented. Based on the results of this study, it is concluded that RegCM4 is well suited to conduct
* Mansour Almazroui [email protected] 1
Center of Excellence for Climate Change Research/Department of Meteorology, King Abdulaziz University, P. O. Box 80234, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
2
Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad, Pakistan
long-term high-resolution climate change projection for the future period over the CORDEX-MENA/Arab domain. Keywords Temperature . Rainfall . Simulation . Regional climate model . CORDEX-MENA/Arab domain
Introduction The Arab region, also called as Middle East and North Africa (MENA), consists of 22 Arab League countries, has remained under pressure to adapt to water scarcity and heat waves throughout the course of the history (WWAP 2012). The ancient societies of MENA region, which is also called as Bcradle of civilization,^ have developed various technical solutions and institutional mechanisms over the period of time in order to deal with such constraints. However, the scale at which the havoc of climate change is looming over the MENA region is alarming, and its impacts are likely to go beyond the coping range of many communities and countries (Sowers e
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