Marine Downscaling of a twentieth century global climate simulation to the Benguela Current system

Description
Global general circulation models (GCMs) represent an important tool for studying climate. However, if they give large scale information, they do not reproduce a realistic description of the local climate in gen- eral. It is therefore common to downscale the results from the GCMs either through a nested high resolution regional climate model (RCM) (Christensen and Christensen, 2002; Christensen et al.,2001,1998) or through empirical/statistical downscaling. In this work the Regional Ocean Model System (ROMS) is used to downscale LU20C2 exper- iment from the coupled IPSL global climate model simulation at a resolution of 9 Km. The selected region is located off of the west coast of Southern Africa, on the Benguela Current System. The selected time period is between 1980 and 1999. The Sea Surface Tempera- ture downscaled outputs are compared with Pathfinder satellite data, while to validate downscaled temperature below surface and salinity we use World Ocean Atlas data. The results show that downscaling gives added values to the IPSL output by providing regional details on the Benguela upwelling area. Temperature and salinity results show that seasonal mean values are very close to the climatology. The used downscaling method is a suitable tool to study marine future climate change on the Benguela current system.
Organised by Josette Imme