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.