Abstract
The effects of climate change are currently a widely investigated issue. However, little attention has been paid to the effects of climate change on regional wave climate. With the growing need towards developing future projections of waves to assess climate-driven impacts on coastal processes, it is required to evaluate the performance of General Circulation Models (GCMs) and Regional Climate Models (RCMs) in simulating wave climate independent of their ability to simulate other standard variables. Near-surface winds, derived from GCMs participating in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) and RCMs from Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), are used to force a spectral wave model to simulate hindcast waves over Indian Ocean (IO) region. The GCM and RCM forced climatological wave characteristics (significant wave height, mean wave period, and mean wave direction) are compared with reanalysis data derived from ERA-Interim for performance evaluation. RCMs work at fine resolution and are assumed to simulate regional climate better than GCMs. However, we identified that there is no added value in simulating wave climate using RCMs. We also identified that there is no improvement in wave simulation upon choosing a fine resolution GCM (~ 1.4°) over a coarse GCM (~ 2.5°). Seasonality in wave characteristics is an important aspect in the IO. The skill of climate models in capturing seasonality was also evaluated. It is observed that ensemble GCM forced wave simulations capture seasonality better than other models. Finally, it is recommended to use ensemble GCM wind forcing for better wave simulation in the IO region.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped in improving the manuscript. The authors sincerely acknowledge the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India and IDP in Climate Studies, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay for providing financial assistance through Project No. 11DST078 to the first author for pursuing PhD. We acknowledge the World Climate Research Programme’s Working Group on Coupled Modeling, which is responsible for CMIP, and we thank the climate modeling groups (listed in Table 2 of this paper) for producing and making available their model output. Authors acknowledge the Centre for Climate Change Research (CCCR-IITM) for RegCM4 and Rossby Centre, Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), Sweden for RCA4, for generating and disseminating the CORDEX South Asia multi-model ensemble dataset. The authors also acknowledge European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) for providing ERA wave hindcasts (http://www.ecmwf.int).
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Chowdhury, P., Behera, M.R. Evaluation of CMIP5 and CORDEX derived wave climate in Indian Ocean. Clim Dyn 52, 4463–4482 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4391-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4391-0