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Journal Articles Geophysical Research Letters Year : 2012

Regional climate downscaling with prior statistical correction of the global climate forcing

Abstract

A novel climate downscaling methodology that attempts to correct climate simulation biases is proposed. By combining an advanced statistical bias correction method with a dynamical downscaling it constitutes a hybrid technique that yields nearly unbiased, high-resolution, physically consistent, three-dimensional fields that can be used for climate impact studies. The method is based on a prior statistical distribution correction of large-scale global climate model (GCM) 3-dimensional output fields to be taken as boundary forcing of a dynamical regional climate model (RCM). GCM fields are corrected using meteorological reanalyses. We evaluate this methodology over a decadal experiment. The improvement in terms of spatial and temporal variability is discussed against observations for a past period. The biases of the downscaled fields are much lower using this hybrid technique, up to a factor 4 for the mean temperature bias compared to the dynamical downscaling alone without prior bias correction. Precipitation biases are subsequently improved hence offering optimistic perspectives for climate impact studies.
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Dates and versions

ineris-00961787 , version 1 (20-03-2014)

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Augustin Colette, Robert Vautard, M. Vrac. Regional climate downscaling with prior statistical correction of the global climate forcing. Geophysical Research Letters, 2012, 39 (13), pp.NC. ⟨10.1029/2012GL052258⟩. ⟨ineris-00961787⟩
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