Downscaling High-Resolution Precipitation from Regional Climate Model Output

• Activity Number: 519
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 1, 2012 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Statistics and the Environment
• Author(s): Ernst Linder*+ and Yibin Pan and Eric M Laflamme
• Companies: University of New Hampshire and University of New Hampshire and University of New Hampshire
• Keywords: Climate Change Impacts ; Multivariate Extremes ; NARCCAP

Abstract

There is a great societal need in assessing the impacts of projected climate change on infrastructure design, such as of dams, bridges and coastal roads. Such impact assessment typically requires future projections of high-resolution time series of temperature, precipitation, solar radiation and related variables. We propose a methodology to downscale projected three-hourly precipitation series from the NARCCAP regional climate model output to hourly inputs at the local point scale. The method is based on joint distributions of precipitation extremes over a threshold using a perfect dependence copula formulation. We evaluate the method with an application to several locations in New England using several NARCCAP model outputs. A comparison to existing methods such as in Kallache et al. (2011) will also be provided.