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Regional climate model performance in the Lake Victoria basin

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Abstract

Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world, plays a crucial role in the hydrology of equatorial eastern Africa. Understanding how climate change may alter rainfall and evaporation patterns is thus of vital importance for the economic development and the livelihood of the region. Regional rainfall distribution appears, up to a large extent, to be controlled by local drivers which may be not well resolved in general circulation model simulations. We investigate the performance over the Lake Victoria basin of an ensemble of UK Met Office Hadley Centre regional climate model (HadRM3P) simulations at 50 km, driven by five members of the Hadley Centre global perturbed-physics ensemble (QUMP). This is part of the validation of an ensemble of simulations that has been used to assess the impacts of climate change over the continent over the period 1950–2099. We find that the regional climate model is able to simulate a lake/land breeze over Lake Victoria, which is a significant improvement over the driving global climate model and a vital step towards reproducing precipitation characteristics in the region. The local precipitation correlates well with large-scale processes in the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, which is in agreement with observations. We find that the spatial pattern of precipitation in the region and the diurnal cycle of convection is well represented although the amount of rainfall over the lake appears to be overestimated in most seasons. Reducing the observational uncertainty in precipitation over the lake through future field campaigns would enable this model bias to be better quantified. We conclude that increasing the spatial resolution of the model significantly improves its ability to simulate the current climate of the Lake Victoria basin. We suggest that, despite the higher computational costs, the inclusion of a model which allows two-way interactions between the lake and its surroundings should be seriously considered for any new climate projections for the region.

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Notes

  1. Colin Jones, personal communication.

  2. Chris Tubbs, personal communication.

  3. We describe the analysis here in terms of the Pearson correlation coefficient for clarity. Note that non-linear relationships between the time series will not be represented by this measure. In addition, it should be noted that this measure is not resistant to outlying data, in that the Pearson correlation coefficient can be sensitive to a few extreme points. We have also looked at scatter plots of these time series and the Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient (not shown).

  4. Please contact the authors for more information.

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Acknowledgments

Work in this paper has been carried out in support of the project “Adapting to climate change induced water stress in the Nile River Basin”, which was launched in March 2010 as a partnership between the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI), sponsored by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). The GPCP combined precipitation data were developed and computed by the NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center’s Laboratory for Atmospheres as a contribution to the GEWEX Global Precipitation Climatology Project. We acknowledge the Climate Explorer pages at KNMI as they greatly facilitate the access and the post-processing of some of the observational data.

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  1. Met Office Hadley Centre, FitzRoy Road, Exeter, EX1 3PB, Devon, UK

    Karina Williams, Carlo Buontempo & Caroline Bain

  2. Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Earley Gate, PO Box 243, Reading, RG6 6BB, UK

    Jill Chamberlain

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  1. Karina Williams
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Correspondence to Karina Williams.

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Williams, K., Chamberlain, J., Buontempo, C. et al. Regional climate model performance in the Lake Victoria basin. Clim Dyn 44, 1699–1713 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2201-x

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