Retrospective Analysis and Bayesian Model Averaging of CMIP6
Precipitation in the Nile River Basin
Abstract
The Nile river basin is one of the global hotspots vulnerable to climate
change impacts due to fast growing population and geopolitical tensions.
Previous studies demonstrated that general circulation models (GCMs)
frequently show disagreement in the sign of change in annual
precipitation projections. Here, we first evaluate the performance of 20
GCMs from the 6 Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6)
benchmarked against a high spatial resolution precipitation dataset
dating back to 1983 from Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed
Information using Artificial Neural Networks - Climate Data Record
(PERSIANN-CDR). Next, a Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) approach is
adopted to derive probability distributions of precipitation projections
in the Nile basin. Retrospective analysis reveals that most GCMs exhibit
considerable (up to 64% of mean annual precipitation) and spatially
heterogenous bias in simulating annual precipitation. Moreover, it is
shown that all GCMs underestimate interannual variability; thus, the
ensemble range is under-dispersive and a poor indicator of uncertainty.
The projected changes from the BMA model show that the value and sign of
change varies considerably across the Nile basin. Specifically, it is
found that projected change in the two headwaters basins, namely Blue
Nile and upper White Nile is 0.03% and -1.65% respectively; both
statistically insignificant at 0.05. The uncertainty range estimated
from the BMA model shows that the probability of a precipitation
decrease is much higher in the upper White Nile basin whereas projected
change in the Blue Nile is highly uncertain both in magnitude and sign
of change.