Evaluation of a large ensemble regional climate modelling system for extreme weather events analysis over Bangladesh (original) (raw)

2019, International Journal of Climatology

Potential increases in the risk of extreme weather events under climate change can have significant socioeconomic impacts at regional levels. These impacts are likely to be particularly high in South Asia where Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries. Regional climate models (RCMs) are valuable tools for studying weather and climate at finer spatial scales than are typically available in global climate models. Quantitative assessment of the likely changes in the risk of extreme events occurring requires very large ensemble simulations due to their rarity. The weather@home setup within the climateprediction.net distributed computing project is capable of providing the necessary very large ensembles at regionally higher resolution, but has only been evaluated over the South Asia region for its representation of seasonal climatological and monthly means. Here, we evaluate how realistically the HadAM3P-HadRM3P model setup of weather@home can reproduce the observed patterns of temperature and rainfall in Bangladesh with focus on the modelled extreme events. Using very large ensembles of regional simulations, we find that there are substantial spatial and temporal variations in rainfall and temperature biases compared with observations. These are highest in the pre-monsoon, which are largely caused by timing issues in the model. Modelled mean monsoon and post-monsoon temperatures are in good agreement This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as

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