Projected changes in rainfall extremes over West African cities under specific global warming levels using CORDEX and NEX-GDDP datasets

We analyze long-term extreme events in daily precipitation for the period of 1950–2005 and future projections from 2006 to 2100 based on representative concentration pathways (RCP8.5) over West Africa, including twelve major cities of the subregion. The study uses two datasets from the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiments (CORDEX) and NASA Earth eXchange Global Daily Downscaled Projections (NEX–GDDP), for their potential to simulate extreme rainfall characteristics over West Africa. CORDEX datasets are dynamically downscaled from 9 General Circulation Model (GCM) and the NEX-GDDP is statistically downscaled from 21 GCM simulations from CMIP5. The ensemble members of each dataset were used for the analysis and evaluated with eight observations. The projected changes in the rainfall indices were analyzed at four Global Warming Levels (GWLs) under the RCP8.5 climate-forcing scenario. The projections from the CORDEX and NEX-GDDP ensembles were compared. Self-Organizing Map (SOM) analysis was used to classify the projected changes from the simulations into twelve groups, based on their characteristics. Both CORDEX and NEX-GDDP models perform well in simulating the frequency and intensities of daily rainfall characteristics for important parts of the domain. However, substantial differences exist between the models and their relative performance varies with the indices. In all cases, NEX-GDDP outperforms CORDEX in stimulating the extreme indices. On the projections, CORDEX showed a wider spread than the NEX–GDDP for RTOT and vice versa for R97.5pTOT for all the GWLs.