Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Are Climate Model Simulations Useful For Forecasting Precipitation Trends? Hindcast And Synthetic-Data Experiments, Nir Y. Krakauer, Balázs M. Fekete

Publications and Research

Water scientists and managers currently face the question of whether trends in climate variables that affect water supplies and hazards can be anticipated. We investigate to what extent climate model simulations may provide accurate forecasts of future hydrologic nonstationarity in the form of changes in precipitation amount. We compare gridded station observations (GPCC Full Data Product, 1901–2010) and climate model outputs (CMIP5 Historical and RCP8.5 simulations, 1901–2100) in real and syntheticdata hindcast experiments. The hindcast experiments show that imputing precipitation trends based on the climate model mean reduced the root mean square error of precipitation trend estimates for 1961–2010 by …