Climate Change Scenario Generation and Uncertainty Assessment: Multiple variables and potential hydrological impacts

The research presented here represents a collaborative effort with the SFWMD on developing scenarios for future climate for the SFWMD area. The project focuses on developing methodology for simulating precipitation representing both natural quasi-oscillatory modes of variability in these climate variables and also the secular trends projected by the IPCC scenarios that are publicly available. This study specifically provides the results for precipitation modeling. The starting point for the modeling was the work of Tebaldi et al that is considered one of the benchmarks for bias correction and model combination in this context. This model was extended in the framework of a Hierarchical Bayesian Model (HBM) to formally and simultaneously consider biases between the models and observations over the historical period and trends in the observations and models out to the end of the 21st century in line with the different ensemble model simulations from the IPCC scenarios. The low frequency variability is modeled using the previously developed Wavelet Autoregressive Model (WARM), with a correction to preserve the variance associated with the full series from the HBM projections. The assumption here is that there is no useful information in the IPCC models as to the change in the low frequency variability of the regional, seasonal precipitation. This assumption is based on a preliminary analysis of these models historical and future output. Thus, preserving the low frequency structure from the historical series into the future emerges as a pragmatic goal. We find that there are significant biases between the observations and the base case scenarios for precipitation. The biases vary across models, and are shrunk using posterior maximum likelihood to allow some models to depart from the central tendency while allowing others to cluster and reduce biases by averaging. The projected changes in the future precipitation are small compared to the bias between model base run and observations and also relative to the inter-annual and decadal variability in the precipitation.