Journal
CLIMATE DYNAMICS
Volume 58, Issue 5-6, Pages 1587-1611Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s00382-021-05980-w
Keywords
ETCCDI precipitation indices; Regional climate models precipitation assessment; ERA5; NARR; MERRA2; NA-CORDEX; LOCA; Florida extreme precipitation
Categories
Funding
- Department of Energy Office of Science [DE-SC0016605]
- USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch project [1001953, 1010971]
- NIFA [689780, 1001953] Funding Source: Federal RePORTER
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This study evaluates the performance of regional climate models in simulating historical precipitation and climate indices in Florida, finding that some models tend to underestimate summer rainfall and the frequency of extreme precipitation, while overestimating indices such as wet-day precipitation, consecutive dry days, and consecutive wet days.
The present work evaluates historical precipitation and its indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) in suites of dynamically and statistically downscaled regional climate models (RCMs) against NOAA's Global Historical Climatology Network Daily (GHCN-Daily) dataset over Florida. The models examined here are: (1) nested RCMs involved in the North American CORDEX (NA-CORDEX) program, (2) variable resolution Community Earth System Models (VR-CESM), (3) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) models statistically downscaled using localized constructed analogs (LOCA) technique. To quantify observational uncertainty, three in situ-based (PRISM, Livneh, CPC) and three reanalysis (ERA5, MERRA2, NARR) datasets are also evaluated against the station data. The reanalyses and dynamically downscaled RCMs generally underestimate the magnitude of the monthly precipitation and the frequency of the extreme rainfall in summer. The models forced with CanESM2 miss the phase of the seasonality of extreme precipitation. All models and reanalyses severely underestimate both the mean and interannual variability of mean wet-day precipitation (SDII), consecutive dry days (CDD), and overestimate consecutive wet days (CWD). Metric analysis suggests large uncertainty across NA-CORDEX models. Both the LOCA and VR-CESM models perform better than the majority of models. Overall, RegCM4 and WRF models perform poorer than the median model performance. The performance uncertainty across models is comparable to that in the reanalyses. Specifically, NARR performs poorer than the median model performance in simulating the mean indices and MERRA2 performs worse than the majority of models in capturing the interannual variability of the indices.
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