Search

The region of southern Africa (SAF) is among the most exposed climate change hotspots and is projected to experience severe impacts on multiple economical and societal sectors. For this reason, producing reliable projections of the expected impacts of climate change is key for local communities. In this work we use a set of 19 regional climate models (RCMs) performed in the context of the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) - Africa and a set of 10 global climate models (GCMs) participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5), that were used as the driving GCMs in the RCM simulations. We are concerned about the degree to which RCM simulations are influenced by their driving GCMs, with regards to monthly precipitation climatologies, precipitation biases and precipitation change signal, according to the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 for the end of the 21st century. We investigate the degree to which RCMs and GCMs are able to reproduce specific climatic features over SAF and over three sub-regions, namely the greater Angola region, the greater Mozambique region and the greater South Africa region. We identify that during the beginning of the rainy season, when regional processes are largely dependent on the coupling between the surface and the atmosphere, the impact of the driving GCMs on the RCMs is smaller, compared to the core of the rainy season, when precipitation is mainly controlled by the large-scale circulation. In addition, we show that RCMs are able to counteract the bias received by their driving GCMs, hence, we claim that the cascade of uncertainty over SAF is not additive, but indeed the RCMs do provide improved precipitation climatologies. The fact that certain bias patterns over the historical period (1985-2005) identified in GCMs are resolved in RCMs, provides evidence that RCMs are reliable tools for climate change impact studies over SAF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this work is to investigate the recent past and future patterns of the Etesian winds, one of the most persistent localized wind systems in the world, which dominates the wind regime during warm period over the Aegean Sea and eastern Mediterranean. An objective classification method, the Two Step Cluster Analysis (TSCA), is applied on daily data from regional climate model simulations carried out with RegCM3 for the recent past (1961-1990) and future periods (2021-2050 and 2071-2100) constrained at lateral boundaries either by ERA-40 reanalysis fields or the global circulation model (GCM) ECHAM5. Three distinct Etesian patterns are identified by TSCA with the location and strength of the anticyclonic action center dominating the differences among the patterns. In case of the first Etesian pattern there is a ridge located over western and central Europe while for the other two Etesian patterns the location of the ridge moves eastward indicating a strong anticyclonic center over the Balkans. The horizontal and vertical spatial structure of geopotential height and the vertical velocity indicates that in all three Etesian patterns the anticyclonic action center over central Europe or Balkan Peninsula cannot be considered as an extension of the Azores high. The future projections for the late 21st century under SRES A1B scenario indicate a strengthening of the Etesian winds associated with the strengthening of the anticyclonic action center, and the deepening of Asian thermal Low over eastern Mediterranean. Furthermore the future projections indicate a weakening of the subsidence over eastern Mediterranean which is rather controlled by the deepening of the south Asian thermal Low in line with the projected in future weakening of South Asian monsoon and Hadley cell circulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]