TY - JOUR
T1 - Improved confidence in climate change projections of precipitation evaluated using daily statistics from the PRUDENCE ensemble
AU - Boberg, Fredrik
AU - Berg, Peter
AU - Thejll, Peter
AU - Gutowski, William J.
AU - Christensen, Jens H.
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - An ensemble of regional climate modelling simulations from the European framework project PRUDENCE are compared across European sub-regions with observed daily precipitation from the European Climate Assessment dataset by characterising precipitation in terms of probability density functions (PDFs). Models that robustly describe the observations for the control period (1961-1990) in given regions as well as across regions are identified, based on the overlap of normalised PDFs, and then validated, using a method based on bootstrapping with replacement. We also compare the difference between the scenario period (2071-2100) and the control period precipitation using all available models. By using a metric quantifying the deviation over the entire PDF, we find a clearly marked increase in the contribution to the total precipitation from the more intensive events and a clearly marked decrease for days with light precipitation in the scenario period. This change is tested to be robust and found in all models and in all sub-regions. We find a detectable increase that scales with increased warming, making the increase in the PDF difference a relative indicator of climate change level. Furthermore, the crossover point separating decreasing from increasing contributions to the normalised precipitation spectrum when climate changes does not show any significant change which is in accordance with expectations assuming a simple analytical fit to the precipitation spectrum.
AB - An ensemble of regional climate modelling simulations from the European framework project PRUDENCE are compared across European sub-regions with observed daily precipitation from the European Climate Assessment dataset by characterising precipitation in terms of probability density functions (PDFs). Models that robustly describe the observations for the control period (1961-1990) in given regions as well as across regions are identified, based on the overlap of normalised PDFs, and then validated, using a method based on bootstrapping with replacement. We also compare the difference between the scenario period (2071-2100) and the control period precipitation using all available models. By using a metric quantifying the deviation over the entire PDF, we find a clearly marked increase in the contribution to the total precipitation from the more intensive events and a clearly marked decrease for days with light precipitation in the scenario period. This change is tested to be robust and found in all models and in all sub-regions. We find a detectable increase that scales with increased warming, making the increase in the PDF difference a relative indicator of climate change level. Furthermore, the crossover point separating decreasing from increasing contributions to the normalised precipitation spectrum when climate changes does not show any significant change which is in accordance with expectations assuming a simple analytical fit to the precipitation spectrum.
KW - Bootstrapping with replacement
KW - Crossing-point statistics
KW - Extreme events
KW - Precipitation
KW - Probability distributions
KW - Regional climate change
U2 - 10.1007/s00382-008-0446-y
DO - 10.1007/s00382-008-0446-y
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:67349227200
VL - 32
SP - 1097
EP - 1106
JO - Climate Dynamics
JF - Climate Dynamics
SN - 0930-7575
IS - 7-8
ER -