Evaluation of the Regional Climate Model ALARO-0 Over the CORDEX-Africa Domain

High-resolution climate data is needed for assessing the regional and local impact of climate change. Therefore, in this study, for the first time, a simulation at the resolution of 12.5 km was done over the African domain using the regional climate model ALARO-0. This simulation was evaluated using multiple reference datasets, including observations, a reanalysis dataset, and other model simulations. In general, the performance of ALARO-0 in simulating mean monthly and seasonal temperature was comparable to the references. However, ALARO-0 systematically underestimated the daily temperature range, with biases similar to or higher than those of other regional climate model runs over Africa. Some notable biases were found for precipitation, with a tendency towards overestimation over most African regions. ALARO-0 is, however, outperforming the other existing model runs in estimating both the timing of the onset and the unimodal shape of the West African monsoon rainfall. A relatively large spread of precipitation values in the observational datasets was observed, especially over highly elevated areas, which makes the evaluation of the models over these regions difficult and less reliable. To conclude, ALARO-0 shows potential as a regional climate model over Africa, as in general, the performance in simulating mean temperature and precipitation was satisfactory and in accordance with other models and observations. Bias corrections are, however, needed over certain regions or when simulating minimum and maximum temperature, as biases could reach high values.