0000000000201256
AUTHOR
Johanna Ramarohetra
Errors and uncertainties introduced by a regional climate model in climate impact assessments: example of crop yield simulations in West Africa
16 pages; International audience; The challenge of estimating the potential impacts of climate change has led to an increasing use of dynamical downscaling to produce fine spatial-scale climate projections for impact assessments. In this work, we analyze if and to what extent the bias in the simulated crop yield can be reduced by using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) regional climate model to downscale ERA-Interim (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re-Analysis) rainfall and radiation data. Then, we evaluate the uncertainties resulting from both the choice of the physical parameterizations of the WRF model and its internal variability. Impact assessments w…
Downscaling West African climate : uncertainties, sensitivity to the model physics and regional variability
We present here a set of regional climate simulations, complementary to the CORDEX-Africa modeling exercice, performed over West Africa during the 1989-2010 period using the non-hydrostatic model WRF. Lateral and SST forcings are provided by ERA-Interim reanalyses. The regional domain [45W 45E 10S 30N] encompasses West Africa and the nearby Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Guinea. The grid resolution is moderate (80km, with 28 levels on the vertical) in order to reduce computational costs and multiply sensitivity experiments. A first set of fifteen 20-year long simulations addresses the influence of the model physics (convective, radiative and land surface schemes). A second set of simulations co…