Project 02: How well do the CMIP6 models represent the tropical rainfall belt over Africa?

Movement of the tropical rain belt (TRB) is arguably the most important determinant of regional climate in Africa: its average seasonal position defines humidity or aridity and fluctuations lead to flooding or drought. Accurate simulation of the TRB is thus essential to build confidence in future projections of regional African rainfall. However it has been shown that previous generations of climate models have shown significant problems with fundamental aspects of TRB seasonality, particularly over East Africa (Tierney et al. 2015). Here we propose to evaluate the representation of the TRB in CMIP6 models. Existing code is available (Nikulin and Hewitson 2019), which can be used to swiftly assess representation of key attributes of the TRB. From this a more in-depth focus on regional aspects of TRB variability, such as the TRB-influence on Sahel summer rainfall, and its representation in models can be explored, along with future projections.

Contributors

• With links to GitHub profiles / institution pages, etc.

Team leads: Katy Sheen (University of Exeter) Dave MacLeod (University of Bristol)

Team A: Historical data: biases Bethan Harris Michael Baidu Peter Watson Valerie Le Guennec

Team B: Future projections Jess Baker Natalie Lord

Team C: Decadal predictions Brian Lo James Fulton Erin Walker Xiaorong Li

What was done

The methodology of Nikulin & Hewitson 2019 was applied to extract indices of the tropical rain belt (TRB): intensity, position, width. This was applied to monthly mean precipitation from CMIP6 historical, projection and decadal data, in order to understand model biases, future projections and evalutate the skill of decadal predictions.

How we approached the problem and why

[...]

Data we used and how to obtain this

• Team A: CMIP6 historical data
• Team B: CMIP6 scenario projection data
• Team C: DCPP decadal hindcast data

What we did during the hackathon

• [...]

Outcomes

• [...]

About this repo

There are further README files in key directories.

Key files

• [...]
• [...]
• [...]

How to reproduce our outputs

1. [...]
2. [...]
3. [...]

Repo structure

.
├── notebooks
│   ├── [...].ipynb
│   └── [...].ipynb
│           The Jupyter Notebooks that we created
│
├── code
│   ├── [...].py
│   └── [...].py
│           Any code (Python or otherwise) that we created that doesn't
│           sit within a Notebook
│
├── results
│   ├── [...].pdf
│   └── [...].png
│           The key figures that we produced
│
├── data
│   ├── raw_data
│   │       Any data we used that didn't come from JASMIN
│   │
│   └── processed_data
│           Any output data that we produced
│
├── environment.yml
└── environment_frozen.yml
        The libraries and versions that we used

Next steps for our project

• [...]
• [...]
• [...]