changes in precipitation seasonality in west africa predicted by regcm3 and the impact of dynamic vegetation feedback降水季节性变化在西非regcm3和预测的动态植被反馈的影响.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Geophysics Volume 2012, Article ID 597205, 10 pages doi:10.1155/2012/597205 Research Article Changes in Precipitation Seasonality in West Africa Predicted by RegCM3 and the Impact of Dynamic Vegetation Feedback Guiling Wang and Clement A. Alo Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Connecticut, 261 Glenbrook Road, Storrs, CT 06269, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Guiling Wang, gwang@ Received 5 May 2011; Accepted 26 September 2011 Academic Editor: Andrea Sealy Copyright © 2012 G. Wang and C. A. Alo. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Using a regional climate model asynchronously coupled to a dynamic vegetation model, this study examines future climate predictions for the West Africa region and how dynamic vegetation feedback may influence such predictions. Without accounting for the impact of vegetation dynamics, the model predicts a future decrease of annual rainfall over Sahel. Dynamic vegetation feedback reverses this trend, leading to a substantial increase of annual rainfall. Regardless of how vegetation is treated, the predicted future trend of precipitation in the Sahel region follows a specific seasonal pattern, with a decrease during the pre- and early-monsoon season (May-June and early July) due to the warming-induced enhancement of spring convective barrier and an increase after the monsoon is fully established (typically in July-August-September) due to enhanced moisture import from a warmer ocean. Dynamic vegetation feedback reduces the magnitude of the predict