Wind Power Potential in Near Future Climate Scenarios: The Case for Burundi (East Africa)

This paper assessed projected changes of wind power potential in near future climate scenarios over four sites from two contrasting regions of Burundi. Observed and MERRA-2 data sets were considered for the historical period 1981-2010, and a computed Multi-model ensemble for future projections data of eight Regional Climate Models under RCP 4.5 and 8.5 over the period 2011-2040 was used. Regional Climate Models were downscaled at local climate using Empirical Statistical Downscaling method. Mann-Kendall’s test was used for trend analysis over the historical period, while future changes in wind power density (WPD) quartiles were computed for each climate scenario by 2040. The findings revealed an increase in wind power potential all over the area studied with higher values during summer time. Indeed, over the period 2011-2040, the lowest WPD change is projected at Northern highlands (NHL) under RCP 4.5 with 27.03 W.m-2, while the highest WPD change of 46.34 W.m-2 is forecasted under RCP 8.5 at Southern Imbo plain (SIP). The month of August and September are expected to have higher WPD change in RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5, respectively while January is projected to have the lowest WPD. Places near by the Lake Tanganyika are the most favorable areas for wind power generation.

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Solar Irradiance and Temperature Variability and Projected Trends Analysis in Burundi

Climate ◽

10.3390/cli7060083 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 7 (6) ◽

pp. 83 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Agnidé Emmanuel Lawin ◽

Marc Niyongendako ◽

Célestin Manirakiza

Keyword(s):

Solar Irradiance ◽

Climate Models ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Regional Climate Models ◽

Future Climate ◽

Historical Period ◽

Projection Data ◽

Data Set ◽

Variability Analysis ◽

The Future

This paper assessed the variability and projected trends of solar irradiance and temperature in the East of Burundi. Observed temperature from meteorological stations and the MERRA-2 data set provided by NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center are used over the historical period 1976–2005. In addition, solar irradiance data provided by SoDa database were considered. Furthermore, projection data from eight Regional Climate Models were used over the periods 2026–2045 and 2066–2085. The variability analysis was performed using a standardized index. Projected trends and changes in the future climate were respectively detected through Mann-Kendall and t-tests. The findings over the historical period revealed increase temperature and decrease in solar irradiance over the last decades of the 20th century. At a monthly scale, the variability analysis showed that excesses in solar irradiance coincide with the dry season, which led to the conclusion that it may be a period of high production for solar energy. In the future climate, upward trends in temperature are expected over the two future periods, while no significant trends are forecasted in solar irradiance over the entire studied region. However, slight decreases and significant changes in solar irradiance have been detected over all regions.

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Future changes in precipitation, evapotranspiration and streamflows in the Mono Basin of West Africa

Proceedings of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences ◽

10.5194/piahs-384-283-2021 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 384 ◽

pp. 283-288

Author(s):

Lamboni Batablinlè ◽

Lawin E. Agnidé ◽

Kodja Domiho Japhet ◽

Amoussou Ernest ◽

Vissin Expédit

Keyword(s):

West Africa ◽

Climate Models ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Regional Climate Models ◽

Historical Period ◽

Policy Makers ◽

Rcp 8.5 ◽

High Flows ◽

Near Term ◽

The Impact

Abstract. The impact of climate change on precipitation and water availability is of major concern for policy makers in the Mono Basin of West Africa, whose economy mainly depends on rainfed agriculture and hydropower generation. The objective of this study is to project rainfall, flows and evapotranspiration (ET) in the future period and understand their changes across Mono River Basin. Observed data were considered for the historical period 1980–2010, and a Multi-model ensemble for future projections data of eight selected Regional Climate Models under RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5 over the periods 2011–2100 was used. The GR4J model was used to simulate daily flows of the Mono watershed. The ensemble mean shows a decrease and increase streamflows between −54 % and 42 %, −58 % and 31 % under the RCP4.5, RCP8.5 scenario, respectively. The greatest decreases of high flows is projected to occur in the near term under RCP8.5, whereas the greatest decrease of low flows is projected to occur in the long term under the same RCP. For the rainfall and ET, the both scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5) predict an increase of ET while the rainfall will decrease. The results of this study of would be very useful in the choice of management and adaptation policies for water resources management.

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CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS ON PROJECTED PV POWER POTENTIAL UNDER RCP 8.5 SCENARIO IN BURUNDI

International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH ◽

10.29121/granthaalayah.v8.i5.2020.37 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 8 (5) ◽

pp. 1-14

Author(s):

Marc Niyongendako ◽

Agnidé Emmanuel Lawin ◽

Célestin Manirakiza ◽

Serge Dimitri Yikwé Buri Bazyomo ◽

Batablinlè Lamboni

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Solar Irradiance ◽

Climate Models ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Regional Climate Models ◽

Potential Change ◽

Historical Period ◽

Climate Data ◽

Future Period ◽

Near Future

This work focuses on analysis of climate change effects on Photovoltaic (PV) power output in the Eastern and Northeastern of Burundi. Monthly temperature data from meteorological stations and solar irradiance data provided by SoDa database were considered as observed dataset for the historical period 1981-2010. Projection climate data from eight Regional Climate Models of CORDEX for Africa were used over the near future period 2021-2050. The change in temperature and solar irradiance were analyzed and the effects of these climate changes were assessed to show their impacts on PV power potential. The results indicated increasing trends and change in temperature for about 2°C over this near future period. The solar irradiance change was revealed negative with a high interannual variation for all regions and the mean decrease ranges between 2 and 4 W/m². The findings revealed also a negative change in PV power potential close to zero for all regions with a high change occurred in NLL. Indeed, the contribution of each parameter to PV power potential change was negative all over regions. However, the projected climate change does not predict a huge PV power potential change by 2050. Therefore, Burundi may invest in producing electricity energy from PV systems.

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Are climate models that allow better approximations of local meteorology better for the assessment of hydrological impacts? A statistical analysis of droughts

10.5194/nhess-2021-121 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Antonio-Juan Collados-Lara ◽

David Pulido-Velazquez ◽

Juan-de-Dios Gómez-Gómez ◽

Eulogio Pardo-Igúzquiza

Keyword(s):

Climate Models ◽

Climate Model ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Historical Period ◽

Best Approximations ◽

Local Climate ◽

Hydrological Impacts ◽

Rcp 8.5 ◽

Local Meteorology

Abstract. This work studies the benefit of using more reliable local climate scenarios to analyse hydrological impacts. It assumes that more reliable local scenarios are defined with the statistically corrected Regional Climate Model (RCM) simulations when they provide better approximations to the historical basic and drought statistics. The paper analyses if the best solutions in terms of their approximation to the local meteorology also provide the best hydrological assessments. A classification of the corrected RCM simulations attending to both approximations is performed. It has been applied in the Cenajo Basin (southeast Spain), where we demonstrate that the best approximations of the historical meteorological statistics provide also the best approximations of the hydrology ones. The selected RCMs were used to generate future (2071–2100) local scenarios under the RCP 8.5 emission scenario. The two selected RCMs predict significant changes of mean precipitation (−31.6 and −44.0 %) and mean temperature (+26.0 and +32.2 %). They also predict higher frequency (from 5 events in the historical period to 20 and 22 in the future), length (4.8 to 7.4 and 10.5 months), magnitude (2.53 to 6.56 and 9.62 SPI) and intensity (0.48 to 1.00 and 0.94 SPI) of extreme meteorological droughts.

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Regional Climate Scenarios for use in Nordic Water Resources Studies

Hydrology Research ◽

10.2166/nh.2003.0014 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 34 (5) ◽

pp. 399-412 ◽

Cited By ~ 19

Author(s):

M. Rummukainen ◽

J. Räisänen ◽

D. Bjørge ◽

J.H. Christensen ◽

O.B. Christensen ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Water Resources ◽

Climate Models ◽

Global Climate ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Regional Climate Models ◽

Climate Projections ◽

Climate Scenarios ◽

Soil Frost ◽

Nordic Region ◽

Regional Climate Projections

According to global climate projections, a substantial global climate change will occur during the next decades, under the assumption of continuous anthropogenic climate forcing. Global models, although fundamental in simulating the response of the climate system to anthropogenic forcing are typically geographically too coarse to well represent many regional or local features. In the Nordic region, climate studies are conducted in each of the Nordic countries to prepare regional climate projections with more detail than in global ones. Results so far indicate larger temperature changes in the Nordic region than in the global mean, regional increases and decreases in net precipitation, longer growing season, shorter snow season etc. These in turn affect runoff, snowpack, groundwater, soil frost and moisture, and thus hydropower production potential, flooding risks etc. Regional climate models do not yet fully incorporate hydrology. Water resources studies are carried out off-line using hydrological models. This requires archived meteorological output from climate models. This paper discusses Nordic regional climate scenarios for use in regional water resources studies. Potential end-users of water resources scenarios are the hydropower industry, dam safety instances and planners of other lasting infrastructure exposed to precipitation, river flows and flooding.

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Evaluation of uncertainties in mean and extreme precipitation under climate change for northwestern Mediterranean watersheds from high-resolution Med and Euro-CORDEX ensembles

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences ◽

10.5194/hess-22-673-2018 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 22 (1) ◽

pp. 673-687 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Antoine Colmet-Daage ◽

Emilia Sanchez-Gomez ◽

Sophie Ricci ◽

Cécile Llovel ◽

Valérie Borrell Estupina ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

High Resolution ◽

Extreme Precipitation ◽

Climate Models ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Regional Climate Models ◽

Historical Period ◽

Mountainous Regions ◽

Extreme Precipitation Events ◽

Precipitation Events

Abstract. The climate change impact on mean and extreme precipitation events in the northern Mediterranean region is assessed using high-resolution EuroCORDEX and MedCORDEX simulations. The focus is made on three regions, Lez and Aude located in France, and Muga located in northeastern Spain, and eight pairs of global and regional climate models are analyzed with respect to the SAFRAN product. First the model skills are evaluated in terms of bias for the precipitation annual cycle over historical period. Then future changes in extreme precipitation, under two emission scenarios, are estimated through the computation of past/future change coefficients of quantile-ranked model precipitation outputs. Over the 1981–2010 period, the cumulative precipitation is overestimated for most models over the mountainous regions and underestimated over the coastal regions in autumn and higher-order quantile. The ensemble mean and the spread for future period remain unchanged under RCP4.5 scenario and decrease under RCP8.5 scenario. Extreme precipitation events are intensified over the three catchments with a smaller ensemble spread under RCP8.5 revealing more evident changes, especially in the later part of the 21st century.

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Regional Climate Model Emulator based on Deep Learning: Concept and First Evaluation of a Novel Hybrid Downscaling Approach

10.21203/rs.3.rs-725819/v1 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Antoine Doury ◽

Samuel Somot ◽

Sébastien Gadat ◽

Aurélien Ribes ◽

Lola Corre

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Network Architecture ◽

Large Scale ◽

Climate Models ◽

Climate Model ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Regional Climate Models ◽

Future Climate ◽

Near Surface ◽

The Way

Abstract Providing reliable information on climate change at local scale remains a challenge of first importance for impact studies and policymakers. Here, we propose a novel hybrid downscaling method combining the strengths of both empirical statistical downscaling methods and Regional Climate Models (RCMs). The aim of this tool is to enlarge the size of high-resolution RCM simulation ensembles at low cost.We build a statistical RCM-emulator by estimating the downscaling function included in the RCM. This framework allows us to learn the relationship between large-scale predictors and a local surface variable of interest over the RCM domain in present and future climate. Furthermore, the emulator relies on a neural network architecture, which grants computational efficiency. The RCM-emulator developed in this study is trained to produce daily maps of the near-surface temperature at the RCM resolution (12km). The emulator demonstrates an excellent ability to reproduce the complex spatial structure and daily variability simulated by the RCM and in particular the way the RCM refines locally the low-resolution climate patterns. Training in future climate appears to be a key feature of our emulator. Moreover, there is a huge computational benefit in running the emulator rather than the RCM, since training the emulator takes about 2 hours on GPU, and the prediction is nearly instantaneous. However, further work is needed to improve the way the RCM-emulator reproduces some of the temperature extremes, the intensity of climate change, and to extend the proposed methodology to different regions, GCMs, RCMs, and variables of interest.

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The Mesoscale Response to Global Warming over the Pacific Northwest Evaluated Using a Regional Climate Model Ensemble

Journal of Climate ◽

10.1175/jcli-d-21-0061.1 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-56

Keyword(s):

Global Warming ◽

Pacific Northwest ◽

Climate Models ◽

Climate Model ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Wrf Model ◽

Regional Climate Models ◽

Winter Precipitation ◽

Historical Period ◽

Continental Interior

This paper describes the downscaling of an ensemble of twelve GCMs using the WRF model at 12-km grid spacing over the period 1970-2099, examining the mesoscale impacts of global warming as well as the uncertainties in its mesoscale expression. The RCP 8.5 emissions scenario was used to drive both global and regional climate models. The regional climate modeling system reduced bias and improved realism for a historical period, in contrast to substantial errors for the GCM simulations driven by lack of resolution. The regional climate ensemble indicated several mesoscale responses to global warming that were not apparent in the global model simulations, such as enhanced continental interior warming during both winter and summer as well as increasing winter precipitation trends over the windward slopes of regional terrain, with declining trends to the lee of major barriers. During summer there is general drying, except to the east of the Cascades. April 1 snowpack declines are large over the lower to middle slopes of regional terrain, with small snowpack increases over the lower elevations of the interior. Snow-albedo feedbacks are very different between GCM and RCM projections, with the GCM’s producing large, unphysical areas of snowpack loss and enhanced warming. Daily average winds change little under global warming, but maximum easterly winds decline modestly, driven by a preferential sea level pressure decline over the continental interior. Although temperatures warm continuously over the domain after approximately 2010, with slight acceleration over time, occurrences of temperature extremes increase rapidly during the second half of the 21st century.

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Impact of aerosols on the future Euro-Mediterranean climate: results from the CORDEX FPS-Aerosol

10.5194/egusphere-egu21-2211 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Pierre Nabat ◽

Samuel Somot ◽

Lola Corre ◽

Eleni Katragkou ◽

Shuping Li ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Mediterranean Climate ◽

Climate Models ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Regional Climate Models ◽

Surface Radiation ◽

Climate Change Signal ◽

Historical Period ◽

Future Evolution ◽

Aerosol Forcing ◽

The Future

<p>The Euro-Mediterranean region is subject to numerous and various aerosol loads, which interact with radiation, clouds and atmospheric dynamics, with ensuing impact on regional climate. However up to now, aerosol variations are hardly taken into account in most regional climate simulations, although anthropogenic emissions have been dramatically reduced in Europe since the 1980s. Moreover, inconsistencies between regional climate models (RCMs) and their driving global model (GCM) have recently been identified in terms of future radiation and temperature evolution, which could be related to the differences in aerosol forcing.&#160;<br>The present study aims at assessing the role of aerosols in the future evolution of the Euro-Mediterranean climate, using a specific multi-model protocol carried out in the Flagship Pilot Study "Aerosol" of the CORDEX program. This protocol relies on three simulations for each RCM: a historical run (1971-2000) and two future RCP8.5 simulations (2021-2050), a first one with evolving aerosols, and a second one with the same aerosols as in the historical period. Six modeling groups have taken part in this protocol, providing nine triplets of simulations. The analysis of these simulations will be presented here. First results show that the future evolution of aerosols has a significant impact on the evolution of surface radiation and surface temperature. In addition RCM runs taking into account the evolution of aerosols are simulating climate change signal closer to the one of their driving GCM than those with constant aerosols.</p>

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Will Future Climate Favor More Erratic Wildfires in the Western United States?

Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology ◽

10.1175/jamc-d-12-0317.1 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 52 (11) ◽

pp. 2410-2417 ◽

Cited By ~ 22

Author(s):

Lifeng Luo ◽

Ying Tang ◽

Shiyuan Zhong ◽

Xindi Bian ◽

Warren E. Heilman

Keyword(s):

United States ◽

Climate Models ◽

Regional Climate ◽

Fire Behavior ◽

Regional Climate Models ◽

Future Climate ◽

Lower Atmosphere ◽

Western United States ◽

Mountainous Regions ◽

Increased Risk

AbstractWildfires that occurred over the western United States during August 2012 were fewer in number but larger in size when compared with all other Augusts in the twenty-first century. This unique characteristic, along with the tremendous property damage and potential loss of life that occur with large wildfires with erratic behavior, raised the question of whether future climate will favor rapid wildfire growth so that similar wildfire activity may become more frequent as climate changes. This study addresses this question by examining differences in the climatological distribution of the Haines index (HI) between the current and projected future climate over the western United States. The HI, ranging from 2 to 6, was designed to characterize dry, unstable air in the lower atmosphere that may contribute to erratic or extreme fire behavior. A shift in HI distribution from low values (2 and 3) to higher values (5 and 6) would indicate an increased risk for rapid wildfire growth and spread. Distributions of Haines index are calculated from simulations of current (1971–2000) and future (2041–70) climate using multiple regional climate models in the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program. Despite some differences among the projections, the simulations indicate that there may be not only more days but also more consecutive days with HI ≥ 5 during August in the future. This result suggests that future atmospheric environments will be more conducive to erratic wildfires in the mountainous regions of the western United States.

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