Publication Date:
2014-06-13
Description:
Information on extreme precipitation for future climate is needed to assess the changes in the frequency and intensity of flooding. The primary source of information in climate change impact studies is climate model projections. However, due to the coarse resolution and biases of these models, they cannot be directly used in hydrological models. Hence, statistical downscaling is necessary to address climate change impacts at the catchment scale. This study compares eight statistical downscaling methods often used in climate change impact studies. Four methods are based on change factors, three are bias correction methods, and one is a perfect prognosis method. The eight methods are used to downscale precipitation output from fifteen regional climate models (RCMs) from the ENSEMBLES project for eleven catchments in Europe. The overall results point to an increase in extreme precipitation in most catchments in both winter and summer. For individual catchments, the downscaled time series tend to agree on the direction of the change but differ in the magnitude. Differences between the statistical downscaling methods vary between the catchments and depend on the season analysed. Similarly, general conclusions cannot be drawn regarding the differences between change factor and bias correction methods. The performance of the bias correction methods during the control period also depends on the catchment, but in most cases they represent an improvement compared to RCM outputs. Analysis of the variance in the ensemble of RCMs and statistical downscaling methods indicates that up to half of the total variance is derived from the statistical downscaling methods. This study illustrates the large variability in the expected changes in extreme precipitation and highlights the need of considering an ensemble of both statistical downscaling methods and climate models.
Print ISSN:
1812-2108
Electronic ISSN:
1812-2116
Topics:
Geography
,
Geosciences
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