Chapman, S, Bacon, J, Birch, CE orcid.org/0000-0001-9384-2810 et al. (6 more authors) (2023) Climate Change Impacts on Extreme Rainfall in Eastern Africa in a Convection-Permitting Climate Model. Journal of Climate, 36 (1). pp. 93-109. ISSN 0894-8755
Abstract
Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of rainfall extremes. Understanding future changes in rainfall is necessary for adaptation planning. Eastern Africa is vulnerable to rainfall extremes because of low adaptive capacity and high future population growth. Convection-permitting climate models have been found to better represent moderate (yearly) rainfall extremes than parameterized convection models, but there is limited analysis of rare extremes that occur less frequently than once per year. These events often have the largest socioeconomic impacts. We use extreme value theory and regional frequency analysis to quantify rare rainfall extremes over East Africa in a convection-permitting climate model (CP4A). We compare the results with its parameterized counterpart (P25), the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment for the African region (CORDEX-Africa) ensemble, and observations to understand how the convection parameterization impacts the results. We find that CP4A better matches observations than the parameterized models. With climate change, we find the parameterized convection models have unrealistically high changes in the shape parameter of the extreme value distribution, which controls the tail behavior (i.e., the most extreme events), leading to large increases in return levels of events with a return period of >20 years. This suggests that parameterized convection models may not be suitable for looking at relative changes in rare rainfall events with climate change and that convection-permitting models should be preferred for this type of work. With the more realistic CP4A, RCP8.5 end-of-century climate change leads to 1-in-100-yr events becoming 1-in-23-yr events, which will necessitate serious adaptation efforts to avoid devastating socioeconomic impacts.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Copyright 2022 American Meteorological Society (AMS). See https://www.ametsoc.org/PUBSCopyrightPolicy for further information. Reproduced in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | Convection; Extreme events; Climate change |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Inst for Climate & Atmos Science (ICAS) (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number BBSRC (Biotechnology & Biological Sciences Research Council) BB/P027784/1 NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/P021077/1 NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/M02038X/1 NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/M02038X/1 NERC (Natural Environment Research Council) NE/M017176/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 08 Sep 2022 14:37 |
Last Modified: | 09 Jun 2023 00:13 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | American Meteorological Society |
Identification Number: | 10.1175/JCLI-D-21-0851.1 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:190766 |