The West African Monsoon Modeling and Evaluation project (WAMME) and its First Model Intercomparison Experiment

2008

International audience; This paper presents the scientific challenge in West African monsoon (WAM) simulation and discusses the West African Monsoon Modeling and Evaluation project (WAMME) initiative and its approaches to improve WAM simulations. Major scientific highlights from the first WAMME model comparison are the focus of the paper. Based on the first WAMME experiment, the WAMME models' performance is evaluated with precipitation being the major focus. The analyses indicate that the models with specified SST generally have reasonable simulations of the mean spatial distribution of WAM precipitation but largely fail to produce proper daily precipitation frequency distributions. WAMME m…