Evaluating regional climate models for simulating sub-daily rainfall extremes

Climate Dynamics

Volumn 47, Issue 5-6, 2016, Pages 1613-1628

  Cortés Hernández, Virginia Edith ^a   Zheng, Feifei ^b   Evans, Jason ^c   Lambert, Martin ^a   Sharma, Ashish ^c   Westra, Seth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE   (Australia)

^b ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY   (China)

^c UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES   (Australia)

Author keywords

Climate model evaluation; Greater Sydney region; Regional climate models; Sub daily extreme rainfall; Weather Research Forecasting (WRF) model

Indexed keywords

AIR TEMPERATURE; CLIMATE MODELING; EXTREME EVENT; PRECIPITATION INTENSITY; RAINFALL; REGIONAL CLIMATE; WEATHER FORECASTING;

AUSTRALIA; NEW SOUTH WALES; SYDNEY [NEW SOUTH WALES];

EID: 84948690822     PISSN: 09307575     EISSN: 14320894     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s00382-015-2923-4     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Ahern M, Kovats RS, Wilkinson P, Few R, Matthies F (2005) Global health impacts of floods: epidemiologic evidence. Epidemiol Rev 27:36–46
2. Beniston M, Stephenson DB, Christensen OB, Ferro CAT, Frei C, Goyette S, Halsnaes K, Holt T, Jylha K, Koffi B, Palutikof JP, Scholl R, Semmler T, Woth K (2007) Future extreme events in European climate: an exploration of regional climate model projections. Clim Change 81:71–95. doi:10.1007/s10584-006-9226-z
3. Berg P, Moseley C, Haerter JO (2013) Strong increase in convective precipitation in response to higher temperatures. Nat Geosci. doi:10.1038/NGEO1731
4. Buonomo E, Jones R, Huntingford C, Hannaford J (2007) On the robustness of changes in extreme precipitation over Europe from two high resolution climate change simulations. Q J R Meteorol Soc 133(622):65–81. doi:10.1002/qj.13
5. Castro L, Pielke A Sr, Adegoke J (2007) Investigation of the summer climate of the contiguous U.S. and Mexico using the regional atmospheric modeling system (RAMS). Part I: model climatology (1950–2002). J Clim 20:3866–3887. doi:10.1175/JCLI4211.1
6. Chen J, Brissette FP, Chaumont D, Braun M (2013) Finding appropriate bias correction methods in downscaling precipitation for hydrologic impact studies over North America. Water Resour Res 49(7):4187–4205
7. Dai A, Trenberth KE (2004) The diurnal cycle and its depiction in the community climate system model. J Clim 17:930–951
8. Delworth TL, Zeng F (2014) Regional rainfall decline in Australia attributed to anthropogenic greenhouse gases and ozone levels. Nat Geosci 7(8):583–587. doi:10.1038/ngeo2201
9. Evans JP, McCabe MF (2010) Regional climate simulation over Australia’s Murray-Darling basin: a multitemporal assessment. J Geophys Res 115(D14):D14114. doi:10.1029/2010JD013816
10. Evans J, Westra S (2012) Investigating the mechanisms of diurnal rainfall variability using a regional climate model. J Clim 25(20):7232–7247
11. Evans J, Ekström M, Ji F (2012) Evaluating the performance of a WRF physics ensemble over South-East Australia. Clim Dyn 39(6):1241–1258. doi:10.1007/s00382-011-1244-5
12. Evans JP, Ji F, Abramowitz G, Ekström M (2013) Optimally choosing small ensemble members to produce robust climate simulations. Environ Res Lett 8:044050. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/4/044050
13. Evans JP, Ji F, Lee C et al (2014) Design of a regional climate modelling projection ensemble experiment—NARCliM. Geosci Model Dev 7:621–629. doi:10.5194/gmd-7-621-2014
14. Gilmore JB, Evans JP, Sherwood SC, Ekstrom M, Ji F (2015) Extreme precipitation in WRF for the Newcastle East Coast Low of 2007. Theor Appl Climatol. doi:10.1007/s00704-015-1551-6
15. Hallegatte S, Green C, Nicholls RJ, Corfee-Morlot J (2013) Future flood losses in major coastal cities. Nat Clim Change 3(9):802–806. doi:10.1038/nclimate1979
16. Hardwick-Jones R, Westra S, Sharma A (2010) Observed relationships between extreme sub-daily precipitation, surface temperature and relative humidity. Geophys Res Lett. doi:10.1029/2010GL045081
17. Hong SY, Noh Y, Dudhia J (2006) A new vertical diffusion package with an explicit treatment of entrainment processes. Mon Weather Rev 134:2318–2341
18. IPCC (2012) Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. A Special Report of Working Groups I and II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Field, C.B., V. Barros, T.F. Stocker, D. Qin, D.J. Dokken, K.L. Ebi, M.D. Mastrandrea, K.J. Mach, G.-K. Plattner, S.K. Allen, M. Tignor, and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
19. Janjic Z (1994) The step-mountain eta coordinate model: further developments of the convection, viscous sublayer, and turbulence closure schemes. Mon Weather Rev 122:927–945
20. Ji F, Ekström M, Evans JP, Teng J (2014) Evaluating rainfall patterns using physics scheme ensembles from a regional atmospheric model. Theor Appl Climatol 115:297–304. doi:10.1007/s00704-013-0904-2
21. Kain JS (2004) The Kain–Fritsch convective parameterization: an update. J Appl Meteorol 43:170–181
22. Kalnay E, Kanamitsu M, Ristler R, Collins W, Deaven D, Gandin L, Iredell M, Saha S, White G, Woollen J, Zhu Y, Chelliah M, Ebisuzaki W, Higgins W, Janowiak J, Mo KC, Ropelewski C, Wang J, Leetmaa A, Reynolds R, Jenne R, Joseph D (1996) The NCEP/NCAR 40-year reanalysis project. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 77(3):437–471
23. Kendon EJ, Roberts NM, Fowler HJ, Roberts MJ, Chan SC, Senior CA (2014) Heavier summer downpours with climate change revealed by weather forecast resolution model. Nat Clim Change 4(7):570–576. doi:10.1038/nclimate2258
24. Kirchner JW (2006) Getting the right answers for the right reasons: linking measurements, analyses, and models to advance the science of hydrology. Water Resour Res. doi:10.1029/2005WR004362
25. Langhans W, Schmidli J, Fuhrer O, Bieri S, Schar C (2013) Long-term simulations of thermally driven flows and orographic convection at convection-parameterizing and cloud-resolving resolutions. J Appl Meteorol Climatol 52:1490–1510
26. Lenderink G, van Meijgaard E (2008) Increase in hourly precipitation extremes beyond expectations from temperature changes. Nat Geosci 1:511–514
27. Lovejoy S, Mandelbrot B (1985) Fractal properties of rain, and a fractal model. Tellus A 37(3):209–232
28. Mandapaka P, Qin X (2014) A large sample investigation of temporal scale-invariance in rainfall over the tropical urban island of Singapore. Theor Appl Climatol. doi:10.1007/s00704-014-1317-6
29. Maraun D (2013) Bias correction, quantile mapping, and downscaling: revisiting the inflation issue. J Clim 26(6):2137–2143. doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00821.1
30. Maraun D, Osborn T, Rust H (2011) The influence of synoptic airflow on UK daily precipitation extremes. Part I: observed spatio-temporal relationships. Clim Dyn 36(1–2):261–275. doi:10.1007/s00382-009-0710-9
31. Mascaro G, Vivoni ER, Gochis DJ, Watts CJ, Rodriguez JC (2014) Temporal downscaling and statistical analysis of rainfall across a topographic transect in Northwest Mexico. J Appl Meteorol Climatol 53(4):910–927. doi:10.1175/JAMC-D-13-0330.1
32. Nesbitt SW, Zipser EJ (2003) The diurnal cycle of rainfall and convective intensity according to three years of TRMM measurements. J Clim 16:1456–1475
33. Paschalis A, Molnar P, Fatichi S, Burlando P (2013) A stochastic model for high-resolution space-time precipitation simulation. Water Resour Res 49(12):8400–8417. doi:10.1002/2013WR014437
34. Rocheta E, Evans JP, Sharma A (2014) Assessing atmospheric bias correction for dynamical consistency using potential vorticity. Environ Res Lett 9(12):124010
35. Schindler A, Maraun D, Luterbacher J (2012) Validation of the present day annual cycle in heavy precipitation over the British Islands simulated by 14 RCMs. J Geophys Res Atmos 117(D18):D18107. doi:10.1029/2012JD017828
36. Schlather M, Tawn JA (2003) A dependence measure for multivariate and spatial extreme values: properties and inference. Biometrika 90(1):139–156. doi:10.1093/biomet/90.1.139
37. Skamarock W, Klemp J, Dudhia J et al (2008) A description of the advanced research WRF version 3. Mon Wea Rev 88:7–25
38. Trenberth KE, Dai A, Rasmussen RM, Parsons DB (2003) The changing character of precipitation. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 84:1205–1217
39. Tripathi OP, Dominguez F (2013) Effects of spatial resolution in the simulation of daily and subdaily precipitation in the southwestern US. J Geophys Res Atmos 118(14):7591–7605
40. van Pelt SC, Beersma JJ, Buishand TA, van den Hurk BJJM, Kabat P (2012) Future changes in extreme precipitation in the Rhine basin based on global and regional climate model simulations. Hydrol Earth Syst Sci 16(12):4517–4530. doi:10.5194/hess-16-4517-2012
41. Veneziano D, Lepore C (2012) The scaling of temporal rainfall. Water Resour Res 48(8):W08516. doi:10.1029/2012wr012105
42. Wang J, Kotamarthi VR (2014) Downscaling with a nested regional climate model in near-surface fields over the contiguous United States. J Geophys Res Atmos. doi:10.1002/2014JD021696
43. Wang J, Swati FNU, Stein ML, Kotamarthi VR (2015) Model performance in spatiotemporal patterns of precipitation: new methods for identifying value added by a regional climate model. J Geophys Res Atmos. doi:10.1002/2014JD022434
44. Westra S, Alexander LV, Zwiers FW (2013a) Global increasing trends in annual maximum daily precipitation. J Clim 26:3904–3918. doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00502.1
45. Westra S, Evans JP, Mehrotra R, Sharma A (2013b) A conditional disaggregation algorithm for generating fine time-scale rainfall data in a warmer climate. J Hydrol 479:86–99. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2012.11.033
46. Westra S, Fowler HJ, Evans JP, Alexander LV, Berg P, Johnson F, Kendon EJ, Lenderink G, Roberts NM (2014) Future changes to the intensity and frequency of short-duration extreme rainfall. Rev Geophys. doi:10.1002/2014RG000464
47. Zheng F, Westra S, Leonard M (2015a) Opposing local precipitation extremes. Nat Clim Change 5(5):389–390. doi:10.1038/nclimate2579
48. Zheng F, Thibaud E, Westra S, Leonard M (2015b) Assessing the performance of the independence method in modelling spatial extreme rainfall. Water Resour Res. doi:10.1002/2015WR016893