Validation of an RCM over Mainland Southeast Asia focusing on the needs of hydrological models

This work is part of the CLIENT II project Drought-ADAPT, which overall objective is to provide climate services to local stakeholders in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The focus of the project lies on various aspects of drought, its characteristics and causes under recent and future climate change, as the study area has been shown to be vulnerable in this regard.

An important component for this is the use of the regional climate model REMO, which simulates the historical period from 2000-2018 over Mainland Southeast Asia at 0.11° resolution. With this, the run differs from existing CORDEX-simulations which are available in a coarser resolution of 0.22°. For a proper validation with respect to spatio-temporal aspects of its climatology, a comparison of different gridded validation datasets of temperature, precipitation, and potential evapotranspiration is performed as these are important forcing variables for hydrological modeling. Finally, a simple form of bias adjustment is done to compensate systematic model errors and, thus, make the data available and usable for a hydrological model.