Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Combining Outputs From The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program By Using A Bayesian Hierarchical Model, Emily L. Kang, Noel Cressie, Stephan R. Sain

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

We investigate the 20-year-average boreal winter temperatures generated by an ensemble of six regional climate models (RCMs) in phase I of the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program. We use the long-run average (20-year integration) to smooth out variability and to capture the climate properties from the RCM outputs. We find that, although the RCMs capture the large-scale climate variation from coast to coast and from south to north similarly, their outputs can differ substantially in some regions. We propose a Bayesian hierarchical model to synthesize information from the ensemble of RCMs, and we construct a consensus climate signal …