Precipitation from African easterly waves in a coupled model of the tropical Atlantic

Abstract

A region coupled climate model is configured for the tropical Atlantic to explore the role of synoptic-scale African easterly waves (AEWs) on the simulation of mean precipitation in the marine intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ). Sensitivity tests with varying atmospheric resolution in the coupled model show that these easterly waves are well represented with comparable amplitudes on both fine and coarse grids of the atmospheric model. Significant differences in the model simulations are found in the precipitation fields, however, where heavy rainfall events occur in the region of strong cyclonic shear of the easterly waves only on the higher-resolution grid. This is because the low-level convergence due to the waves is much larger and more realistic in the fine-resolution simulation, which enables heavier precipitation events that skew the rainfall distributions toward longer tails. The variability in rainfall on these time scales accounts for more than 60%-70% of the total variability. As a result, the simulation of mean rainfall in the ITCZ and its seasonal migration improves in the higher-resolution case. This suggests that capturing these transient waves and the resultant strong low-level convergence is one of the key ingredients for improving the simulation of precipitation in global coupled climate models.