West African Monsoon water cycle: 2. Assessment of numerical weather prediction water budgets

Water budgets from European Centre for Medium‐Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) Re‐Analysis (ERA)‐Interim and National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Reanalysis I and II are intercompared and compared to GPS precipitable water and to the 6 year hybrid budget data set described in part 1 of this study. Deficiencies are evidenced in the reanalyses which are most pronounced over the Sahel. Results from operational models (ECMWF Integrated Forecast System, NCEP Global Forecast System, and ARPEGE‐Tropiques) and the special ECMWF African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analyses reanalysis confirm and help understanding these findings. A bias (∼1–2 mm d−1) in precipitation and evapotranspiration leads to an unrealistic view of West Africa as a moisture source during the summer. North of the rainband (13°N–16°N), moisture flux convergence (MFC) shows a minimum in the NCEP models and divergence in the ECMWF models not consistent with the hybrid data set. This feature, added to presence of a deep layer of northerly dry air advected at midlevels (800–400 hPa), is thought to block the development of deep convection in the models and the northward propagation of the monsoonal rainband. The northerly flow is part of a shallow meridional circulation that is driven by the Saharan heat low. This circulation appears too strong in some of the models, a possible consequence of the too‐approximate representation of physical processes and land surface properties over the Sahel. In most of the models, evapotranspiration shows poor connection with precipitation. This is linked with large analysis increments in precipitable water, soil moisture, and MFC. Despite the large biases affecting the water budget components in the models, temporal variations (seasonal and interannual) might nevertheless be recovered with reasonable accuracy.