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Evaluating the performance of regional climate models to simulate the US drought and its connection with El Nino Southern Oscillation

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Abstract

The aim of this study is to evaluate the ability of regional climate models (RCMs) to simulate drought pattern, persistence, and the role of El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) on the Continental United States (CONUS) drought. The Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) at 3-month timescale is used to quantify the drought. We use the Taylor diagram, Hurst exponent, and logistic regression technique to measure regional drought pattern, persistence, and the link between drought occurrences and ENSO respectively. The observational data are from the Climate Research Units (CRU), the University of East Anglia while the RCM-simulated data are from the six RCMs participating in the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) for 1979–2015. The results show that RCMs with spectral nudging consistently show large correlations of simulated SPEI with observations over all regions. Observed spatial pattern of the persistence, average severity, and trend in the SPEI time series are very similar to the simulations. RCM simulations generally overestimate the persistence and trends in the SPEI time series while the average severity is underestimated over most regions. The observed link between ENSO and US drought is more prominent during the winter. Unlike for correlations, the RCMs with spectral nudging (CanRCM4, CRCM5 (OURANOS), and WRF) do not show better performance in simulating the link between the ENSO and drought occurrence compared to the RCMs without spectral nudging (CRCM5 (UQAM), RCA4, and RegCM4).

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Data availability

All data used in this study are freely available as mentioned in the acknowledgments.

Code availability

We used R that is available freely from https://www.r-project.org/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of the East Anglia (https://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/cru/data/), the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF: https://www.ecmwf.int/), Climate Data Gateway at NCAR (https://www.earthsystemgrid.org/), NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/gcos_wgsp/Timeseries/Data/nino34.long.anom.data) that produced and made available their output.

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  1. Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA

    Yog Aryal & Jianting Zhu

  2. Department of Geography, University At Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Yog Aryal

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Aryal, Y., Zhu, J. Evaluating the performance of regional climate models to simulate the US drought and its connection with El Nino Southern Oscillation. Theor Appl Climatol 145, 1259–1273 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-021-03704-y

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