Postprocessing of simulated precipitation for impact research in West Africa. Part II: A weather generator for daily data

Data from global and regional climate models refer to grid cells and, hence, are basically different from station data. This particularly holds for variables with enhanced spatio-temporal variability like precipitation. On the other hand, many applications like for instance hydrological models require atmospheric data with the statistical characteristics of station data. Here, we present a dynamical-statistical tool to construct virtual station data based on regional climate model output for tropical West Africa. This weather generator (WEGE) incorporates daily gridded rainfall from the model, an orographic term and a stochastic term, accounting for the chaotic spatial distribution of local rain events within a model grid box. In addition, the simulated probability density function of daily precipitation is adjusted to available station data in Benin. It is also assured that the generated data are still consistent with other model parameters like cloudiness and atmospheric circulation. The resulting virtual station data are in excellent agreement with various observed characteristics which are not explicitly addressed by the WEGE algorithm. This holds for the mean daily rainfall intensity and variability, the relative number of rainless days and the scaling of precipitation in time. The data set has already been used successfully for various climate impact studies in Benin.