Fig. \ref{fig:boxplotDif} shows the difference of East African rainfall annual cycles between the historical coupled runs and the corresponding AMIP runs from the 21 CMIP5 models. The historical\(-\)AMIP rainfall differences are largely negative from January to May. Moreover, the historical run is drier than the AMIP for all models during Feburary–April, with the largest multimodel mean discrepancy (\(>\)1 mm day\({}^{-1}\)) occurring in April. During the summer season of June–September (JJAS), the historical\(-\)AMIP rainfall difference is near zero and only the September multimodel mean difference is greater than 0.5 mm day\({}^{-1}\). The multimodel mean difference of historical\(-\)AMIP rainfalls peaks at around 1 mm day\({}^{-1}\) in October, the first month of the short rains, decreases during the following two months and falls to a slight negative value in December. Overall, the historical runs are wetter than the AMIP runs during the short rains, and drier during the long rains.