Regional climate simulation of WRF model over north Africa: temperature and precipitation

Regional climate models are commonly used to provide detailed information on climatic conditions at local or regional scale. This work presents evaluation of the first simulation (temperature and precipitation) of a series of climate simulations (dust and aerosols climate simulations) with WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) model over a large domain covering most of the African continent. The 5.5 years simulations (July 2006-December 2011) have been compared with gridded observational datasets (CRU, GPCC) and gridded satellite dataset (CMORPH) for several variables, including seasonal precipitation, mean, maximum and minimum 2-meter air temperature. The regional climate model reproduces the observed spatial distribution of temperature well; with a cold bias model simulation along with the study period over most African continent for mean, maximum and minimum temperatures, while warm bias appears in minimum temperatures. For precipitation the WRF model reproduces well the rain belt and precipitation distributions in DJF and JJA seasons, while was slightly incapability in simulation in MAM and SON.