Evaluating possible changes in air temperature and precipitation pattern in Mozambique by comparing present and future RegCM4 simulation

Abstract Unlike the global and regional assessment, the spatial-temporal variability of air temperature and precipitation, caused by climate change, must be more useful when the assessment is made at sub-regional to local scale. Thus, this study aims to assess the possible changes in pattern of air temperature and precipitation for late 21st century relative to present climate over Mozambique. For this purpose the downscaling to finer horizontal grid resolution of 50 km was run for present and under two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), moderate RCP4.5 and strong RCP8.4, through a regional climate model RegCM4.0 driven by HadGEM2 global model. The climate pattern considered were analyzed for two time slices, baseline (1971–2000) and future (2070 − 2099) range within Mozambique borders. Over this study domain, the highest amounts of precipitation and the highest air temperatures are observed during summer season. However, the central region is quite warmer and rainier than the northern and southernmost regions. The regional model RegCM4.0 demonstrate agreement relative to observed weather stations and interpolated dataset from Climate Research Unit. The strong performance of RegCM4.0 is revealed by the more realistic local spatio-temporal climate features, tied to topography and geographical location of the study domain. The future increases in mean annual air temperature is well simulated by the model but, the spatial distribution and magnitude differ between the RCPs and over each of the three regions throughout the country. The sharp hottest response in the end of the century occurs in summer and spring seasons under RCP8.5, spatially over the central and northern region of the study domain, with some hot-spot in southern region. On the other hand, there is a predominance drier response in the annual mean precipitation but, during the summer season is observed a meridional dipolarization pattern, with wettest response over southernmost and drier response in northern and central regions of Mozambique.