The Southern African sub-continent experiences large climate variations. The climate forcings for the region are not well understood. In particular, local regional forcings such as soil moisture, surface moisture availability and vegetation feedbacks to the local climate are not well understood.

This paper presents an analysis of a 15 year regional model integration over the Southern African region forced by global reanalysis atmospheric fields. The model used incorporates a land surface model which models soil moistures and temperatures and the interaction of the land surface with the atmosphere. The regional model offers several advantages over global models the most noticable being the increased horizontal and vertical resolution which allows detailed analysis of local interactions and forcings.

The analysis technique presented is that of kinematic moisture trajectories. In particular, a very large number of backward trajectories are initiated at a large number of locations and levels across the domain and at a daily temporal frequency. The analysis of the climatological characteristics of these trajectories and their relation to both local and large scale atmospheric forcings will be presented and discussed.