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Climate and weather data such as precipitation derived from Global Climate Models (GCMs) and satellite observations are essential for the global and local hydrological assessment. However, most climatic popular precipitation products (with spatial resolutions coarser than 10km) are too coarse for local impact studies and require “downscaling” to obtain higher resolutions. Traditional precipitation downscaling methods such as statistical and dynamic downscaling require an input of additional meteorological variables, and very few are applicable for downscaling hourly precipitation for higher spatial resolution. Based on dynamic dictionary learning, we propose a new downscaling method, PreciPatch, to address this challenge by producing spatially distributed higher resolution precipitation fields with only precipitation input from GCMs at hourly temporal resolution and a large geographical extent. Using aggregated Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for GPM (IMERG) data, an experiment was conducted to evaluate the performance of PreciPatch, in comparison with bicubic interpolation using RainFARM—a stochastic downscaling method, and DeepSD—a Super-Resolution Convolutional Neural Network (SRCNN) based downscaling method. PreciPatch demonstrates better performance than other methods for downscaling short-duration precipitation events (used historical data from 2014 to 2017 as the training set to estimate high-resolution hourly events in 2018).
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Understanding the variability of large-scale statistical downscaling methods under different climate regimes
Large-scale downscaling plays an important role in assessing global impacts on hydrological sphere due to climate changes. In such downscaling efforts, it is essential to consider the various climate regimes. Although previous studies have indirectly suggested that the accuracy of downscaling might differ among climate regimes, research that systematically understands or quantifies the variability of this accuracy remains scarce. This study addresses this gap by systematically quantifying the performance of five different large-scale downscaling methods across various climate regimes in the context of downscaling hydroclimatic indicators. Our findings indicate that large-scale downscaling yields the highest accuracy on average when applied to temperature, precipitation, and runoff in tropical, arid, and temperate climate regimes, respectively, while showing poor accuracy in polar regimes for all variables. The maximum difference of normalized root mean squared errors for hydroclimate indicators is 69 % across climate zones, and the spatial distribution of downscaling accuracy aligns with spatial distribution of climate zones. The variation of downscaling accuracy is particularly significant in temperature, precipitation, and seasonal runoff indicators. Furthermore, linkages between accuracy of climate and hydrological indicators differ by climate zones. The underlying reasons for the different accuracy of downscaling are spatially different accuracy of global climate models (GCMs) and interaction of downscaling structure and climate regimes. This study articulated the source of spatially different accuracy/uncertainties for large-scale downscaling that have never been addressed before. The findings of this study provide valuable support in selecting appropriate downscaling methods, ultimately enhancing the spatial reliability and accuracy of large-scale downscaling methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2208562
- PAR ID:
- 10535765
- Publisher / Repository:
- Journal of Hydrology
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Hydrology
- Volume:
- 641
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0022-1694
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 131818
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Climate, downscaling
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhydrol.2024.131818
