REHIPRE · Simulating REalistic HIgh-resolution PREcipitation in the tropics

Simulating REalistic HIgh-resolution PREcipitation in the tropics

The Maritime Continent an intricate tropical archipelago with very complex topography and surrounded by one of the warmest oceans in the world (Indo-Pacific warm pool). This combination of factors creates very specific precipitation features and makes the region extremely problematic in terms of simulating the physical mechanisms that generate rainfall. In fact, a realistic representation of deep convection and rainfall in tropical regions remains a major challenge for atmospheric models and they often incur in systematic errors. The Maritime Continent is at a centre of interaction across scales, which connects local processes with the global circulation. Hence, global model errors in this region propagate through the entire Earth system and affect model estimates in remote regions too. This project addresses the question of whether precipitation is more realistically simulated by providing finer description of the atmosphere, representing convection explicitly and taking into account air-sea mesoscale interactions. A better understanding of convective processes and their interaction with the environment is crucial to enhance the realism of tropical rainfall in models and improve our estimates of changes in rainfall characteristics in the Maritime Continent. This is key to determine effects on agriculture, forest fires, floods and vector-borne diseases in a region that is home of 275 million people and with climate repercussions at global scales. The overarching aim of the project is advance our knowledge of the interactions between local circulation patterns, fine-scale air-sea interaction and tropical convection to represent precipitation characteristics more accurately. This is achieved through three specific objectives: 1) To determine the effect of model resolution on local circulation, convective processes and precipitation, 2) To identify key mechanisms required to correctly represent local circulation and convection and 3) To establish the implications of future climate change for convective processes and rainfall.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union