Assessment of simulated rainfall and temperature from the regional climate model REMO and future changes over Central Africa

This work investigates spatial and temporal changes in rainfall and temperature over Central Africa, using historical and representative concentration pathways (RCP2.6, RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) of the regional climate model REMO forced by two general climate models: the Europe-wide Consortium Earth System Model (EC-Earth) and the Max Planck Institute-Earth System Model (MPI-ESM). We found that in the present period (1980–2005), the spatial distribution of rainfall is simulated with an annual spatial pattern correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.76 for REMO driven by EC-Earth and 0.74 for REMO driven by MPI-ESM respectively when compared to CRU data. In terms of temperature, the annual PCC is 0.93 for the two REMO outputs. According to the climatology of Central Africa, we subdivided the study area into five sub-regions, we also noticed that the annual and seasonal PCC depend on the considered sub-region. For the future period (2070–2095), temperature is projected to increase following all the three scenarios. The rainfall amount is projected to decrease by up to 5 mm/day towards the end of the twenty first century under RCP8.5 scenario, and by 1–2 mm/day under RCP4.5 and RCP2.6 scenarios over Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Congo, north-western Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Lake Victoria. Significant decrease is predicted to occur mostly in the northern part of the domain under RCP8.5 scenario. However, future rainfall over High Lands of Cameroon, Adamawa Plateau, north-eastern DRC and Atlantic Ocean is projected to increase.