A number of studies have investigated the interannual variability in RCM simulations driven by analyses of observations over different regions (e.g., Lüthi et al., 1996 for Europe; Giorgi et al., 1996 and Giorgi and Shields 1999 for the continental USA; Sun et al., 1999 for East Africa; Small et al., 1999a for central Asia; Rinke et al., 1999 for the Arctic; van Lipzig, 1999 for Antarctica). These show that RCMs can reproduce well interannual anomalies of precipitation and surface air temperature, both in sign and magnitude, over sub-regions varying in size from a few hundred kilometres to about 1,000 km (Figure 10.11).
At the intra-seasonal scale, the timing and positioning of regional climatological
features such as the East Asia rain belt and the Baiu front can be reproduced
with a high degree of realism with an RCM (Fu et al., 1998). A good simulation
of the intra-seasonal evolution of precipitation during the short rain season
of East Africa has also been documented (Sun et al., 1999). However, at shorter
time-scales, Dai et al. (1999) found that, despite a good simulation of average
precipitation, significant problems were exhibited by an RCM simulation of the
observed diurnal cycle of precipitation over different regions of the USA.
Only a few examples are available of analysis of variability in RCMs driven
by GCMs. At the intra-seasonal scale, Bhaskaran et al. (1998) showed that the
leading mode of sub-seasonal variability of the South Asia monsoon, a 30 to
50 day oscillation of circulation and precipitation anomalies, was more realistically
captured by an RCM than the driving GCM. Hassell and Jones (1999) then showed
that a nested RCM captured observed precipitation anomalies in the active break
phases of the South Asia monsoon (5 to 10 periods of anomalous circulations
and precipitation) that were absent from the driving GCM (Figure
10.12).
At the daily time-scale, some studies have shown that nested RCMs tend to simulate too many light precipitation events compared with station data (Christensen et al. 1998; Kato et al., 2001). However, RCMs produce more realistic statistics of heavy precipitation events than the driving GCMs, sometimes capturing extreme events entirely absent in the GCMs (Christensen et al., 1998; Jones, 1999). Part of this is due to the inherent disaggregation of grid-box mean values resulting from the RCM’s higher horizontal resolution. However, in one study, even when aggregated to the GCM grid scale, the RCM was closer to observations than the driving GCM (Durman et al., 2001).
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