The added value of using convective-permitting regional climate model simulations to represent cloud band events over South America

Climate science has long explored whether higher resolution regional climate models (RCMs) provide improved simulation of regional climates over global climate models (GCMs). The advent of convective-permitting RCMs (CPRCMs), where sufficiently fine-scale grids allow explicitly resolving rather than parametrising convection, has created a clear distinction between RCM and GCM formulations. This study investigates the simulation of tropical-extratropical (TE) cloud bands in a suite of pan-South America convective-permitting Met Office Unified Model (UM) and Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) climate simulations. All simulations produce annual cycles in TE cloud band frequency within 10–30% of observed climatology. However, too few cloud band days are simulated during the early summer (Nov–Dec) and too many during the core summer (Jan–Feb). Compared with their parent forcing, CPRCMs simulate more dry days but systematically higher daily rainfall rates, keeping the total rain biases low. During cloud band systems, the CPRCMs correctly reproduced the observed changes in tropical rain rates and their importance to climatology. Circulation analysis suggests that simulated lower subtropical rain rates during cloud bands systems, in contrast to the higher rates in the tropics, are associated with weaker northwesterly moisture flux from the Amazon towards southeast South America, more evident in the CPRCMs. Taken together, the results suggest that CPRCMs tend to be more effective at producing heavy daily rainfall rates than parametrised simulations for a given level of near-surface moist energy. The extent to which this improves or degrades biases present in the parent simulations is strongly region-dependent.