WASCAL WRF60km with GFDL-ESM r1i1p1 forcing from the CMIP5 historical experiment

Project: West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use - With climate change being one of the most severe challenges to Africa in the 21st century, West Africa is facing an urgent need to develop effective adaptation and mitigation measures. WASCAL (West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use, wascal.org) is a large-scale research-focused Climate Service Centre designed to help tackle this challenge and thereby enhance the resilience of human and environmental systems to climate change and increased variability. It does so by strengthening the research infrastructure and capacity in West Africa related to climate change and by pooling the expertise of ten West African countries and Germany. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), WASCAL is implemented in a collaborative effort by West African and German partners. An integral part of its climate services is the provisioning of a new set of high resolution, ensemble-based regional climate change scenarios for the region of West Africa. An ensemble approach is chosen to address model uncertainties and provide statistical estimates on possible future climate change scenarios. The ensemble is composed of three regional climate models, WRFV3.5.1, COSMO-CLM 4.18, and REGCM4. Three Earth System Models from the CMIP5 project are downscaled by each of the regional models, MPI-ESM, GFDL-ESM2M, and HadGEM2-ES for the historical period from 1980 to 2010 and for the RCP4.5 scenario from 2020 to 2050 and from 2070 to 2100. Control runs are created by downscaling the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ERA-Interim re-analysis from 1980 to 2014. Two sets of resolutions are made available, 60km and 12km, for a large domain covering the greater region of West Africa from 25W to 25E and 5S to 25N. Summary: This experiment uses 'CMIP5 GFDL r1i1p1 historical' forcing data for downscaling to 60km resolution by the regional model WRFV3.5.1 for the region of West Africa. 'historical' is an experiment of the CMIP5 - Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (pcmdi.llnl.gov). 3.2 historical (3.2 Historical) - Version 1: Simulation of recent past (1850 to 2005). Experiment design:cera-www.dkrz.de . This experiment is divided into several time slices of 11 years. The first year of each time slice is used as a spin-up phase and should not be used in the analysis. All experiments with GFDL forcing refer to a calendar with 365 days (noleap). The 60 km resolution of this experiment is an intermediate step to the 12km downscaling WRF experiment.