Abstract
Precipitation and temperature biases from a set of Regional Climate Models from the CORDEX initiative have been analysed to assess the extent to which the biases may impact the climate change signal. The analysis has been performed for the South American CORDEX domain. A large warm bias was found over central Argentina (CARG) for most models, mainly in the summer season. Results indicate that the possible origin of this bias is an overestimation of the incoming shortwave radiation, in agreement with an underestimation of the relative humidity at 850 hPa, a variable that could be used to diagnose cloudiness. Regarding precipitation, the largest biases were found during summertime over northeast of Brazil (NEB), where most models overestimate the precipitation, leading to wet biases over that region. This bias agrees with models’ underestimation of both the moisture flux convergence and the relative humidity at lower levels of the atmosphere. This outcome suggests that the generation of more clouds in the models may drive the wet bias over NEB. These systematic errors could affect the climate change signal, considering that these biases may not be stationary. For both CARG and NEB regions, models with higher warm biases project higher warming levels, mainly in the summer season. In addition, it was found that these relationships are statistically significant with a confidence level of 95%, pointing out that biases are linearly linked with the climate change signal. For precipitation, the relationship between the biases and the projected precipitation changes is only statistically significant for the NEB region, where models with the largest wet biases present the greatest positive precipitation changes during the warm season. As in the case of biases, the analysis of the temperature and precipitation projections over some regions of South America suggests that clouds could affect them. The results found in this study point out that the analysis of the bias behaviour could help in a better interpretation of the climate change signal.
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Data availability
The CORDEX regional climate models are available at: https://cordex.org/data-access/.
The CPC dataset is available at: https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.cpc.globaltemp.html and https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.cpc.globalprecip.html.
The ERA-interim reanalysis are available at: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era-interim.
The GLDAS data is available at: https://ldas.gsfc.nasa.gov/data.
The GEWEX-SRB dataset is available at: https://asdc.larc.nasa.gov/project/SRB.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers, whose comments and suggestions allowed improving the manuscript.
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This work was supported by University of Buenos Aires Grant (UBACYT2018 20020170100117BA), Agencia Nacional de Promoción Científica y Tecnológica Grant (PICT-2018-02496), Universidad Nacional de La Plata Grants (PPID/G006 and PPID/G008).
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JB wrote the main manuscript text and prepared the figures. SSA reviewed and edited the manuscript text.
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Blázquez, J., Solman, S.A. Temperature and precipitation biases in CORDEX RCM simulations over South America: possible origin and impacts on the regional climate change signal. Clim Dyn 61, 2907–2920 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06727-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-023-06727-5