G. Srinivasan et al., AN EVALUATION OF THE SPATIAL AND INTERANNUAL VARIABILITY TROPICAL PRECIPITATION AS SIMULATED BY GCMS, Geophysical research letters, 22(16), 1995, pp. 2139-2142
Precipitation is one of the most difficult variables to simulate in a
General Circulation Model and arguably one of the most important. The
Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) provides an opportuni
ty to examine the simulation of precipitation in a wide array of model
s. Monthly precipitation fields produced by a subset of 19 currently a
vailable AMIP model experiments are evaluated for the tropical region
using a land-only observed dataset for the period 1980-1988. The model
s show large variations in their ability to reproduce observed tropica
l precipitation, although spatial correlations indicate that some of t
he models simulate the pattern of observed precipitation fields fairly
well. The correlations are strongest during boreal winter (DJF) and w
eakest during the boreal summer (JJA). Comparison between model and ob
served precipitation time series for two Central Pacific locations sho
w that most models are unable to reliably reproduce interannual precip
itation variability in this region.