West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL) high-resolution climate simulation data, links to subset of variables at daily and monthly temporal resolution in NetCDF format

With climate change being one of the most severe challenges to Africa in the 21st century, West Africa is facing an urgent need to develop effective adaptation and mitigation measures. WASCAL (West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use, http://www.wascal.org) is a large-scale research-focused Climate Service Centre designed to help tackle this challenge and thereby enhance the resilience of human and environmental systems to climate change and increased variability. It does so by strengthening the research infrastructure and capacity in West Africa related to climate change and by pooling the expertise of ten West African countries and Germany. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), WASCAL is implemented in a collaborative effort by West African and German partners.
An integral part of its climate services is the provisioning of a new set of high resolution, ensemble-based regional climate change scenarios for the region of West Africa. An ensemble approach is chosen to address model uncertainties and provide statistical estimates on possible future climate change scenarios. The ensemble is composed of three regional climate models, WRFV3.5.1, COSMO-CLM 4.18, and REGCM4. Three Earth System Models from the CMIP5 project are downscaled by each of the regional models, MPI-ESM, GFDL-ESM2M, and HadGEM2-ES for the historical period from 1980 to 2010 and for the RCP4.5 scenario from 2020 to 2050 and from 2070 to 2100. Control runs are created by downscaling the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ERA-Interim re-analysis from 1980 to 2014. Two sets of resolutions are made available, 60km and 12km, for a large domain covering the greater region of West Africa from 25W to 25E and 5S to 25N.
The data provided here is a subset of the full data set, which is available at the CERA database of the German Climate Computing Center DKRZ (Heinzeller et al., 2017, https://cera-www.dkrz.de/WDCC/ui/Project.jsp?acronym=WASCAL).