Hybrid approach in statistical bias correction of projected precipitation for the frequency analysis of extreme events

A general circulation model (GCM) can be applied to project future climate factors, such as precipitation and atmospheric temperature, to study hydrological and environmental climate change. Although many improvements in GCMs have been proposed recently, projected climate data are still required to be corrected for the biases in generating data before applying the model to practical applications. In this study, a new hybrid process was proposed, and its ability to perform bias correction for the prediction of annual precipitation and annual daily maxima, was tested. The hybrid process in this study was based on quantile mapping with the gamma and generalized extreme value (GEV) distributions and a spline technique to correct the bias of projected daily precipitation. The observed, and projected daily precipitation values from the selected stations were analyzed using three bias correction methods, namely, linear scaling, quantile mapping, and hybrid methods. The performances of these methods were analyzed to find the optimal method for prediction of annual precipitation and annual daily maxima. The linear scaling method yielded the best results for estimating the annual average precipitation, while the hybrid method was optimal for predicting the variation in annual precipitation. The hybrid method described the statistical characteristics of the annual maximum series (AMS) similarly to the observed data. In addition, this method demonstrated the lowest root mean squared error (RMSE) and the highest coefficient of determination (R-2) for predicting the quantiles of the AMS for the extreme value analysis of precipitation. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.