Analysis of rainfall and temperature simulated from Reanalysis in Timor-Leste

Timor-Leste is located in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, about 500 km from the sea border with Australia and the land border with Indonesia. It has an area of approximately 14,954 km² and an estimated population of 1.293 million people. The climate is influenced by the Asian Monsoon regime, in addition to the strong influence of El Niño Southern Oscillation and intra-seasonal variability. Despite its small territory it presents an interesting climatic diversity and until now, studies on the efficiency of large-scale dynamic models on it have not been reported. Thus, the objective is to analyze the skill of two reanalyses in simulating precipitation and temperature over the territory of Timor-Leste. For that, we used the precipitation and temperature data collected in eight (8) cities in the period of 2013 and 2014 with monthly sampling. The models were the ERA-5 and ERA-interim, which are re-analyzes of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The results show that ERA-5 reanalysis performed better compared to ERA-interim, both for precipitation and temperature. However, the result of the model depends on the geographic location of the station. In general, the models were worse in cities located in mountainous regions. We conclude that, in general, the ERA-5 reanalysis managed to reproduce in a more adequate way both the monthly temperature and the rainfall in Timor-Leste.