Using a statistical preanalysis approach as an ensemble technique for the unbiased mapping of GCM changes to local stations

Abstract

Accounting for climate change, GCM-based projections and their uncertainty are relevant to study potential impacts on hydrological regimes as well as to analyze, operate, and design water infrastructure. Traditionally, several downscaled and/or bias-corrected GCM projections are individually or jointly used to map the raw GCMs' changes to local stations and evaluate uncertainty. However, the preservation of GCMs' statistical attributes is by no means guaranteed, and thus alternative methods to cope with this issue are needed. This work develops an ensemble technique for the unbiased mapping of GCM changes to local stations, which preserves local climate variability and the GCMs' statistics. In the approach, trend percentiles are extracted from the GCMs to represent the range of future long-term climate conditions to which local climatic variability is added. The approach is compared against a method in which each GCM is individually used to build future climatic scenarios from which percentiles are computed. Both approaches were compared to study future precipitation conditions in three Chilean basins under future climate projections based on 45 GCM runs under the RCP8.5 scenario. Overall, the approaches produce very similar results, even if a few trend percentiles are adopted in the GCM preanalysis. In fact, using 5-10 percentiles produces a mean absolute difference of 0.4% in the estimation of the probabilities of consecutive years under different precipitation thresholds, which is ~60% less than the error obtained using the median trend. Thus, the approach successfully preserves the GCM's statistical attributes while incorporating the range of projected climates.