Retrospective forecasts of Sahelian summer rainfall by the use of a MOS approach and DEMETER data

Performance of DEMETER calibration for rainfall forecasting purposes: Application to the July–August Sahelian rainfall

International audience; This work assesses and compares the skill of direct and model-output-statistics (MOS) calibrated hindcasts of the July–August rainfall amounts for the dry period 1980–2000 over the Sahel issued from the Development of a European Multimodel Ensemble System for Seasonal to Interannual Prediction (DEMETER) experiment, with the aim to highlight among the simulated parameters, i.e., those potentially relevant for rainfall forecasts purposes. Three approaches were used: the DEMETER (1) direct rainfall, (2) MOS-calibrated rainfall, and (3) MOS-calibrated atmospheric dynamics and energy. Canonical correlation analyses (CCA) were employed in the two latter approaches to calib…