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ABSTRACT The mean climatology, inter-model variability and spatio-temporal patterns of temperature and precipitation over West Africa from Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 ( CMIP5), CMIP5_SUBSET [ensemble of global climate models driving COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment ( CORDEX)] and CORDEX multi-model ensembles are evaluated and intercompared for the monsoon season (June-September). We find that, while CORDEX fails to outperform the simulated mean climatology of temperature by the CMIP5 ensembles, it substantially improves precipitation and provides more realistic fine-scale features tied to local topography and landuse. This improved performance over the region is found to depend more on the internal models physics than the driving boundary conditions and results from a more consistent and realistic simulation of monsoon precipitation across the various regional climate models ( RCMs). Rotated empirical orthogonal function ( REOF) analysis indicates that the CORDEX ensemble captures better the spatio-temporal variability of both temperature and precipitation (first REOF mode), in particular depicting the warming and Sahel precipitation recovery in recent decades over West Africa. On the other hand, the spatial patterns and associated time series of the last two REOF modes in CORDEX mostly follow the CMIP5_SUBSET pointing towards a strong role of the boundary forcing in the RCM simulation of precipitation variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, the latest version of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics Regional Climate Model (RegCM4) driven by three CMIP5 Global Climate Models (GCMs) is used at 25 km grid spacing over West Africa to investigate the impact of lateral boundary forcings on the simulation of monsoon precipitation and its relationship with regional circulation features. We find that the RegCM4 experiments along with their multimodel ensemble generally reproduce the location of the main precipitation characteristics over the region and improve upon the corresponding driving GCMs. However, the provision of different forcing boundary conditions leads to substantially different precipitation magnitudes and spatial patterns. For instance, while RegCM4 nested within GFDL-ESM-2M and HadGEM2-ES exhibits some underestimations of precipitation and an excessively narrow Intertropical Convergence Zone, the MPI-ESM-MR driven run produces precipitation spatial distribution and magnitudes more similar to observations. Such a superior performance originates from a much better simulation of the interactions between baroclinicity, temperature gradient and African Easterly Jet along with an improved connection between the Isentropic Potential Vorticity, its gradient and the African Easterly Waves dynamics. We conclude that a good performing GCM in terms of monsoon dynamical features (in this case MPI-ESM-MR) is needed to drive RCMs in order to achieve a better representation of the West Africa summer monsoon precipitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]