Journal article;CRP5; ISI; Southern Africa‘s hydro-economy and water security (SAHEWS)EPTD; DSGDPRCGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE

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A technique for producing regional rainfall forecasts for southern Africa is developed that statistically maps or ''recalibrates'' large-scale circulation features produced by the ECHAM3.6 general circulation model (GCM) to observed regional rainfall for the December-February (DJF) season. The recalibration technique, model output statistics (MOS), relates archived records of GCM fields to observed DJF rainfall through a set of canonical correlation analysis (CCA) equations. After screening several potential predictor fields, the 850-hPa geopotential height field is selected as the single predictor field in the CCA equations that is subsequently used to produce MOS-recalibrated rainfall patterns. The recalibrated forecasts outscore area-averaged GCM-simulated rainfall anomalies, as well as forecasts produced using a simple linear forecast model. The MOS recalibration is applied to two sets of GCM experiments: for the ''simulation'' experiment, simultaneous observed sea surface temperature (SST) serves as the lower boundary forcing; for the ''hindcast'' experiment, the prescribed SSTs are obtained by persisting the previous month's SST anomaly through the forecast period. Pattern analyses performed on the predictor-predictand pairs confirm a robust relationship between the GCM 850-hPa height fields and the rainfall fields. The structure and variability of the large-scale circulation is well characterized by the GCM in both simulation and hindcast mode. Measures of retroactive skill for a 9-yr independent period (1991/92-1999/2000) using the hindcast MOS are obtained for both deterministic and probabilistic forecasts, suggesting that a probabilistic representation of MOS forecasts is potentially more valuable. Finally, MOS is employed to investigate its potential to downscale the GCM large-scale circulation to more specific forecasts of land surface characteristics such as streamflow.

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