Assessment of cmip6 simulations over tropical south america

Abstract

This study assesses the performance of 46 global climate models of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (Phase 6)-CMIP6 and selects better models in simulating the precipitation and the air temperature at 2 meters height climatology over tropical South America (SA) during the historical period (1996-2014). For this reason, some statistical measures are computed. A great number of models have a small bias when compared with observation, however, a lot of them have a poor performance in terms of the Willmott agreement index, which indicates a low performance in representing the temporal variability. Among the 46 models, E3SM-1-0, EC-Earth3, EC-Earth3-AerChem, EC-Earth3-Veg, IPSL-CM6A-LR, MPI-ESM1-2-LR and TaiESM1 have a better performance in reproducing SA climate. When the ensemble of the 7 models is compared with that 46 models, there is a reduction in the bias of the variables under study in some sectors of the SA. This indicates that the use of 7 models is enough for application in other studies.