Selecting the best general circulation model and historical period to determine the effects of climate change on precipitation

Abstract

Assessing the effects of climate change is a key component of the sustainable management of water resources and food security. In this paper, general circulation models (GCM) were evaluated using historical information for Birjand synoptic station, Iran. Modeling was performed using 35 models of the Fifth Climate Change Report for 27 historical periods. The results showed that longer annual periods are the most suitable periods for hydrological simulation when data are available. Therefore, the periods of 1960-1990 may be the most appropriate periods due to the adaptation to the observation data. To estimate rainfall, periods with more years showed a more accurate forecast of the future. Moreover, the results showed more changes in the RCP 8.5 scenario than in the RCP 4.5 scenario. According to the comparison of models, the NorESM1-M model with a root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.091 and the GISS-E2-R model with a low percent bias (PBIAS) can be an appropriate model for estimating rainfall.