Abstract
Precipitation extremes have tangible societal impacts. Here, we assess if current state of the art global climate model simulations at high spatial resolutions (0.35°×0.35°) capture the observed behavior of precipitation extremes in the past few decades over the continental US. We design a correlation-based regionalization framework to quantify precipitation extremes, where samples of extreme events for a grid box may also be drawn from neighboring grid boxes with statistically equal means and statistically significant temporal correlations. We model precipitation extremes with the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution fits to time series of annual maximum precipitation. Non-stationarity of extremes is captured by including a timedependent parameter in the GEV distribution. Our analysis reveals that the high-resolution model substantially improves the simulation of stationary precipitation extreme statistics particularly over the Northwest Pacific coastal region and the Southeast US. Observational data exhibits significant non-stationary behavior of extremes only over some parts of the Western US, with declining trends in the extremes. While the high resolution simulations improve upon the low resolution model in simulating this non-stationary behavior, the trends are statistically significant only over some of those regions.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2178-2187 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | Procedia Computer Science |
| Volume | 51 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2015 |
| Event | International Conference on Computational Science, ICCS 2002 - Amsterdam, Netherlands Duration: Apr 21 2002 → Apr 24 2002 |
Funding
This work was funded by a grant from the Office of Science [Biological and Environmental Research (BER)] of the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) and used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725. CPC US Unified Precipitation data were provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, and was obtained from their Web site at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/. MERRA data have been provided by the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center through the NASA GES DISC online archive. The ’evd’ software package in R is created by Alec Stephenson and was obtained from http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/evd/index.html. The ’mpi4py’ module is created by Lisandro Dalcin and was obtained from mpi4py.scipy.org.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| U. S. Department of Energy | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| Office of Science | |
| Biological and Environmental Research |
Keywords
- Climate extremes
- High resolution climate modeling
- Non-stationarity of extremes