REGIONAL CLIMATE-CHANGE SCENARIOS BASED ON IPCC EMISSIONS PROJECTIONS WITH SOME ILLUSTRATIONS FOR AFRICA

This paper describes a method for constructing regional climate change scenarios associated with greenhouse gas emissions projections. This method utilises results from a number of General Circulation Model (GCM) experiments and scales them according to the global-mean projections from a one-dimensional upwelling-diffusion model. . A key aspect of this methodology is an evaluation of the performance of the GCMs in their simulation of current climate. This scenario construction method has the advantage of not relying on any single GCM and of being able to quantify inter-model differences in the regional pattens of climate change. The resulting climate scenarios are limited, however, since they do not consider climate changes which may occur due to forcing factors other than greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosol and they assume that the spatial pattern of the enhanced greenhouse signal remains constant with time. Some results of applying this method for the African continent are presented.