Weather and Climate Dynamics
Weather and Climate Dynamics
WCD
Articles | Volume 6, issue 1
Articles | Volume 6, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-6-113-2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
https://doi.org/10.5194/wcd-6-113-2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Articles | Volume 6, issue 1
Research article
 | 
21 Jan 2025
Research article |  | 21 Jan 2025

Surrogate-based model parameter optimization in simulations of the West African monsoon

Matthias Fischer, Peter Knippertz, and Carsten Proppe

Data sets

GPM IMERG final precipitation L3 half hourly 0.1 degree x 0.1 degree V06 G. Huffman et al. https://doi.org/10.5067/GPM/IMERG/3B-HH/07

ERA5 hourly data on pressure levels from 1940 to present H. Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.bd0915c6

ERA5 hourly data on single levels from 1940 to present H. Hersbach et al. https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.adbb2d47

Model code and software

mattfis/wam-simulations: v1.0.2 Matthias Fischer https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11505849

SciPy 1.0: Fundamental Algorithms for Scientific Computing in Python (https://github.com/scipy/scipy) P. Virtanen et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-019-0686-2

Scikit-learn: Machine Learning in Python (https://github.com/scikit-learn/scikit-learn) F. Pedregosa et al. https://jmlr.org/beta/papers/v12/pedregosa11a.html

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Short summary
The West African monsoon is vital for millions but difficult to represent with numerical models. Our research aims at improving monsoon simulations by optimizing three model parameters – entrainment rate, ice fall speed, and soil moisture evaporation – using an advanced surrogate-based multi-objective optimization framework. Results show that tuning these parameters can sometimes improve certain monsoon characteristics, however at the expense of others, highlighting the power of our approach.
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