Investigating Indian summer monsoon in coupled regional land–atmosphere downscaling experiments using RegCM4

Abstract

The ability of Regional Climate Model (RCM: RegCM4) forced with two different Global Climate Model (GCM: CCSM4 and MIROC5) and three land-surface parameterization (LSP) (i.e., BATS, CLM4.5 and Subgrid-BATS) in simulating the Indian summer monsoon (ISM) is tested for the present climate (1975–2005). Thus six simulation combinations are assessed for seasonal mean temperature, precipitation, and low-level wind for ISM season (June, July, August, September: JJAS) over the COordinated Regional climate Downscaling EXperiment-South Asia (CORDEX-SA) domain. The simulations are evaluated in terms of Taylor’s metric (for precipitation, temperature, zonal wind, meridional wind and total cloud fraction), mean annual cycle, index of agreement, normalized root mean squared deviation and probability distribution function. The experiments simulated moderate events more accurately than high-intensity precipitation events compared to the corresponding observations. The inherent biases in the model simulations are attributed to the weaker meridional wind along with restrained vertical motion during ISM, especially with CCSM4 forcing. A careful analysis of tropospheric temperature gradient (TTG) suggests a weaker north–south (N–S) gradient due to the warmer atmospheric column in these experiments. On the contrary, the MIROC5_CLM4.5 experiment captures the magnitude and the temporal evolution of TTG better during ISM. It also represents the mean features of ISM better than other experiments. Also, the CLM4.5 LSP shows promising performance in ISM simulation when forced with MIROC5. It also provides further avenues for testing of the same combination under different frameworks, including the intended future climate study. This study emphasizes the importance of using appropriate GCM and LSP forcings to the RCM for simulating a coupled complex systems such as ISM.