High-resolution long-term WRF climate simulations over Volta Basin. Part 1: validation analysis for temperature and precipitation

A 26-year simulation (1980–2005) was performed with the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model over the Volta Basin in West Africa. This was to investigate the ability of a climate version of WRF to reproduce present day temperature and precipitation over the Volta Basin. The ERA-Interim reanalysis and one realization of the ECHAM6 global circulation model (GCM) data were dynamically downscaled using two nested domains within the WRF model. The outer domain had a horizontal resolution of 50 km and covered the whole of West Africa while the inner domain had a horizontal resolution of 10 km. It was observed that biases in the respective forcing data were carried over to the RCM, but also the RCM itself contributed to the mean bias of the model. Also, the biases in the 50-km domain were transferred unchanged, especially in the case of temperature, to the 10-km domain, but, for precipitation, the higher-resolution simulations increased the mean bias in some cases. While in general, WRF underestimated temperature in both the outer (mean biases of −1.6 and −2.3 K for ERA-Interim and ECHAM6, respectively) and the inner (mean biases of −0.9 K for the reanalysis and −1.8 K for the GCM) domains, WRF slightly underestimated precipitation in the coarser domain but overestimated precipitation in the finer domain over the Volta Basin. The performance of the GCM, in general, is good, particularly for temperature with mean bias of −0.7 K over the outer domain. However, for precipitation, the added value of the RCM cannot be overlooked, especially over the whole West African region on the annual time scale (mean biases of −3% for WRF and −8% for ECHAM6). Over the whole Volta Basin and the Soudano-Sahel for the month of April and spring (MAM) rainfall, respectively, mean bias close to 0% was simulated. Biases in the interannual variability in both temperature and precipitation over the basin were smaller in the WRF than the ECHAM6. High spatial pattern correlations between 0.7 and 0.8 were achieved for the autumn precipitation and low spatial correlation in the range of 0.0 and 0.2 for the winter season precipitation over the whole basin and all the three belts over the basin.