Reanalysis-driven climate simulation over CORDEX North America domain using the Canadian Regional Climate Model, version 5: model performance evaluation

Abstract

The performance of reanalysis-driven Canadian Regional Climate Model, version 5 (CRCM5) in reproducing the present climate over the North American COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment domain for the 1989-2008 period has been assessed in comparison with several observation-based datasets. The model reproduces satisfactorily the near-surface temperature and precipitation characteristics over most part of North America. Coastal and mountainous zones remain problematic: a cold bias (2-6°C) prevails over Rocky Mountains in summertime and all year-round over Mexico; winter precipitation in mountainous coastal regions is overestimated. The precipitation patterns related to the North American Monsoon are well reproduced, except on its northern limit. The spatial and temporal structure of the Great Plains Low-Level Jet is well reproduced by the model; however, the night-time precipitation maximum in the jet area is underestimated. The performance of CRCM5 was assessed against earlier CRCM versions and other RCMs. CRCM5 is shown to have been substantially improved compared to CRCM3 and CRCM4 in terms of seasonal mean statistics, and to be comparable to other modern RCMs.

Comparison of a very-fine-resolution GCM with RCM dynamical downscaling in simulating climate in China

“…This is mainly due to its more realistic topographic forcings, comprehensive physical processes, and the related improvement in simulation results relative to the driving GCM (Ju et al, 2007;Yu et al, 2010Yu et al, , 2015Gao et al, 2012;Endris et al, 2013;Martynov et al, 2013). The method appears to be more effective for regions with complex topography, such as China, characterized by its wide variety of highly different landscapes, with the Tibetan Plateau and various mountain chains in the west and the north and lower lands in the east (Gao et al, 2008).…”

On the Arctic near-surface permafrost and climate sensitivities to soil and snow model formulations in climate models

“…The offline LSM simulations presented in this study are performed with CLASS (Verseghy 1991(Verseghy , 2008Verseghy et al 1993), and the regional climate model used is a developmental version of the CRCM5 (Zadra et al 2008;Martynov et al 2013). One might note that the CRCM5 uses CLASS as its land surface scheme.…”

“…The CRCM5 (Zadra et al 2008;Martynov et al 2013) is based on a limited-area version of the Global Environment Multiscale (GEM) model used for Numerical Weather Prediction at Environment Canada (Côté et al 1998). GEM employs semi-Lagrangian transport and (quasi) fully implicit marching scheme.…”

The impact of ENSO and the NAO on extreme winter precipitation in North America in observations and regional climate models

“…Examination of teleconnections between features occurring outside the RCM domain and simulated precipitation in the current climate is a critical question that has received limited attention, particularly given the need for confidence in high-resolution climate projections that are used for planning and adaption purposes. It is necessary to assess not only whether an RCM simulates the statistics of climate extremes correctly (Whan and Zwiers 2015;Martynov et al 2013 provide such evaluations for the CanRCM4 and CRCM5) but also to evaluate whether the models simulate the teleconnections with large-scale climate features well (Whan et al 2015b). The study of RCMs simulation of 'moderate' indices of climate extremes has been extensive.…”