Evaluation of CMIP5 Global Climate Models for Simulating Climatological Temperature and Precipitation for Southeast Asia

Abstract

This study evaluates the performances of all forty different global climate models (GCMs) that participate in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) for simulating climatological temperature and precipitation for Southeast Asia. Historical simulations of climatological temperature and precipitation of the 40 GCMs for the 40-year period of 1960–1999 for both land and sea and those for the century of 1901–1999 for land are evaluated using observation and reanalysis datasets. Nineteen different performance metrics are employed. The results show that the performances of different GCMs vary greatly. CNRM-CM5-2 performs best among the 40 GCMs, where its total error is 3.25 times less than that of GCM performing worst. The performance of CNRM-CM5-2 is compared with those of the ensemble average of all 40 GCMs (40-GCM-Ensemble) and the ensemble average of the 6 best GCMs (6-GCM-Ensemble) for four categories, i.e., temperature only, precipitation only, land only, and sea only. While 40-GCM-Ensemble performs best for temperature, 6-GCM-Ensemble performs best for precipitation. 6-GCM-Ensemble performs best for temperature and precipitation simulations over sea, whereas CNRM-CM5-2 performs best over land. Overall results show that 6-GCM-Ensemble performs best and is followed by CNRM-CM5-2 and 40-GCM-Ensemble, respectively. The total errors of 6-GCM-Ensemble, CNRM-CM5-2, and 40-GCM-Ensemble are 11.84, 13.69, and 14.09, respectively. 6-GCM-Ensemble and CNRM-CM5-2 agree well with observations and can provide useful climate simulations for Southeast Asia. This suggests the use of 6-GCM-Ensemble and CNRM-CM5-2 for climate studies and projections for Southeast Asia.