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Constraining Climate Model Projections of Regional Precipitation Change
Author(s) -
Zhang Bosong,
Soden Brian J.
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2019gl083926
Subject(s) - downscaling , precipitation , climatology , environmental science , climate change , climate model , general circulation model , representative concentration pathways , meteorology , geology , geography , oceanography
As communities prepare for the impacts of climate change, policy makers and stakeholders increasingly require locally resolved projections of future climate. Statistical downscaling uses low‐resolution outputs from climate models and historical observations to both enhance the spatial resolution and correct for systematic biases. By examining the downscaled rainfall over land, we show that although bias corrections are effective in reducing biases in the current climate, they do not reduce the intermodel spread in future rainfall projections. This failure stems from the strong dependence of future rainfall change upon the current climatological rainfall patterns. Even after bias corrections are applied, the downscaled projections of precipitation change retain this dependence upon their native climatology. However, we show that this dependence can be exploited; even very simple methods to subset models according to their ability to resolve the observed rainfall climatology can substantially reduce the intermodel spread in rainfall projections.