Authors: Romain Ramel Hubert Gallée Christophe Messager
Publish Date: 2006/01/10
Volume: 26, Issue: 4, Pages: 429-440
Abstract
The regional climate model MAR is used to perform a simulation of the year 1992 over West Africa It is shown that MAR is able to simulate the main features of the rainy regime over West Africa and especially the discontinuous seasonal progression of the West African Monsoon along the year One particular feature that is reasonably well reproduced is the abrupt shift of the rain band from 5° to 10°N at the end of June also called “monsoon jump” This study suggests that such a phenomenon is associated with the shift of the Saharan heat low between two favourite positions one being over the Sahelian area 10–15°N and the other over the Saharan area 20–25°N These two favourite locations of the heat low are linked to the spatial distribution of surface albedo over West Africa that drives the spatiotemporal location of the surface temperature maxima A detailed analysis of this “monsoon jump” is performed and the causes of the strong decrease in precipitation that precedes the northward shift of the rain band are also investigatedAll major computations were realised with IDRIS computing resources The authors thank the NCEP ECMWF UDEL institutions for their datasets The GPCP merged analysis of pentad precipitation is created at the CPC of NOAA Thanks to Bernard Fontaine and Frederic Hourdin for useful discussions and comments We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their help in improving this paper This research was in part supported by the AMMA international program
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