Statistical Downscaling for Climate Science

Global climate models are our main tool to generate quantitative climate projections, but these models do not resolve the effects of complex topography, regional scale atmospheric processes and small-scale extreme events. To understand potential regional climatic changes, and to provide information for regional-scale impact modeling and adaptation planning, downscaling approaches have been developed. Regional climate change modeling, even though it is still a matter of basic research and questioned by many researchers, is urged to provide operational results. One major downscaling class is statistical downscaling, which exploits empirical relationships between larger-scale and local weather. The main statistical downscaling approaches are perfect prog (often referred to as empirical statistical downscaling), model output statistics (which is typically some sort of bias correction), and weather generators. Statistical downscaling complements or adds to dynamical downscaling and is useful to generate user-tailored local-scale information, or to efficiently generate regional scale information about mean climatic changes from large global climate model ensembles. Further research is needed to assess to what extent the assumptions underlying statistical downscaling are met in typical applications, and to develop new methods for generating spatially coherent projections, and for including process-understanding in bias correction. The increasing resolution of global climate models will improve the representation of downscaling predictors and will, therefore, make downscaling an even more feasible approach that will still be required to tailor information for users.