The atmosphere over East Africa is found to be convectively stable in general year-round but with an annual cycle dominated by the surface moist static energy (MSE), which is in phase with the precipitation annual cycle. To explore these distinctive features, ERA-Interim data are used to analyze the associated annual cycles of atmospheric convective stability, circulation, and moisture budget. This study lends confidence to the idea that climate simulations and projections at kilometer-scale could soon become operationally feasible, thus offering interesting perspectives for resolving features that are currently out of reach with coarser-mesh models.Įast African precipitation is characterized by a dry annual mean climatology compared to other deep tropical land areas and a bimodal annual cycle with the major rainy season during March–May (MAM often called the ''long rains'') and the second during October–December (OND often called the ''short rains''). A pragmatic consideration is developed arguing that kilometer-scale simulations could be achieved at a reasonable computational cost with time-slice simulations of high impact climate events. Kinetic energy spectra are used to document the spin-up time and the effective resolution of the simulations as a function of their grid meshes. The results show the added value afforded by very high-resolution meshes for a realistic simulation of the SLRV winds. The cascade method is illustrated using a suite of five one-way nested, time-slice simulations carried out with the fifth-generation Canadian Regional Climate Model, with grid meshes varying from roughly 81 km, successively to 27, 9, 3 and finally 1 km, over domains centered on the SLRV. Lawrence River Valley (SLRV) as the test-bench and (2) to establish some constraints to be satisfied for the physical realism and the computational affordability of these simulations. The purpose of this study is two-fold: (1) to illustrate the perspectives offered by climate simulations on kilometer-scale grid meshes using the wind characteristics in the St. With the refinement of grid meshes in regional climate models permitted by the increase in computing power, the grid telescoping or cascade method, already used in numerical weather prediction, can be applied to achieve very high-resolution climate simulations.
0 kommentar(er)
