SciDev.net has an article today about some analysis of data produced by CASCADE. As part of his doctoral thesis at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, Kamoru Lawal (now at the Nigerian Meteorological Agency) examined how CAM5.1 climate simulations performed under the CASCADE project manage to reproduce the major seasonal weather systems affecting West Africa and Southern Africa. Results revealed some rather fundamental differences in the nature of predictability over both regions. For instance, while averaging across a large number of simulations substantially improves the skill of predicting seasonal rainfall over Southern Africa, it provides little improvement over West Africa, even though the model’s skill is similar over both regions.
The Calibrated and Systematic Characterization, Attribution, and Detection of Extremes (CASCADE) project advances the Nation’s ability to identify and project climate extremes and how they are impacted by environmental drivers.