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Showing posts with label Hydrological modelling for climate-change impact assessment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hydrological modelling for climate-change impact assessment. Show all posts

Statistical Downscaling Model

Statistical Downscaling Model (SDSM) developed by Wilby et al. (2002) widely used for testing the downscaling feasibility in the simulation of daily precipitation series.

Downscaling Method

In climate change analysis, problems occur when dealing with the scale differences between global (or regional) climate models and local hydrologic models. The resolution of available GCM output is typically between 200 and 1000 km, for many impacts models, however, information is required on regional scale (i.e. 100km) and/or local scale (i.e. 10km). One potential solution to this problem is to downscale the output from the GCM to a local scale.
It is noted that downscaling should prove to be a useful tool for assessments involving multiple air issues, including climate change, because of the physical links between these issues and large-scale atmospheric flow. Downscaling schemes can be grouped into two broad categories; dynamical and statistical downscaling schemes. Dynamical downscaling (DD) employs a regional climate model (RCM). These models are driven by boundary conditions derived from observations and from the output of larger-scale global atmospheric models over a limited spatial domain. Wilby et al. (2002) found that DD methods are computationally costly and still need to downscale the output in order to use it in impact models.
The second method involves the development of statistical relationships between observed large scale variables of observed climate and local variables such as site-specific temperature and/or precipitation. These relationships are assumed to remain constant under a changed climate, and are applied to predict future local climate form the future large scale conditions simulated by a GCM (Wilby and Wigley, 1997). Statistical downscaling (SD) techniques are commonly based on methods from linear or non linear regression analysis, stochastic processes, artificial neural networks, etc. Each methodology has its unique strengths for reproducing specific statistical features of the fields. Notably, SD methods are computationally
inexpensive and do not required detailed information about physical processes.

Rainfall Variability due to Climate Change

As for the cause of climate change, climate variability and parameter are often described and quantified by general circulation models (GCMs).The idea behind the evaluation of different climate change scenarios generated by the GCMs was to provide a wide range of scenarios for the next century built upon various detailed assumptions about non-climate factors such as global driving variables and emissions, other environmental factors and regional socio-economic factor which correspond to energy production and emission schemes. The most comprehensive emissions scenarios currently available are those from the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), which detail emissions of carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), as well as other atmospheric constituents not accounted for by previous emissions scenarios (IPCC, 2000).
Rainfall is often governed by synoptic atmospheric patterns. Therefore, downscaling methods is widely used to evaluate the relationship between atmospheric patterns and rainfall data.The downscaling methods is used to evaluate local effects of a global climate change.