Naslov
Statistical downscaling of climate impact indices : testing the direct approach

Autori
Casanueva, Ana ; Frías, Maria Dolores ; Herrera, Sixto ; San-Martín, Daniel ; Zaninović, Ksenija ; Gutiéerrez, Jose Manuel

Izvornik
Climatic change (0165-0009) 127 (2014), 3; 547-560

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u časopisima, članak, znanstveni

Ključne riječi
Statistical Downscaling · Climate Impact Indices · FWI · PET

Sažetak
Climate Impact Indices (CIIs) are being increasingly used in different socioeconomic sectors to transfer information about climate change impacts to stakeholders. Typically, CIIs comprise into a single index several weather variables —such as temperature, wind speed, precipitation and humidity— which are relevant for a particular problem of interest. Moreover, most of the CIIs require daily (or monthly) physical coherence among these variables for their proper calculation. This hinders the application of statistical downscaling methods, since only a small fraction of them meet this requirement. In the present study we test the suitability of an alternative “direct” downscaling approach in which the downscaling method is applied directly to the CII, thus circumventing the problem and allowing the use of a wider range of downscaling methods. For illustrative purposes, we consider two popular CIIs —the Fire Weather Index (FWI) and the Physiological Equivalent Temperature (PET), used in the wildfire and tourism sectors, respectively— and compare the performance of the standard (component-wise) and the direct downscaling approaches using the analog method. Similar results are obtained in both cases, although smaller accuracy is obtained in general with the direct approach. Moreover, similar results (similar climate change ‘deltas’) are also obtained when applying both analog approaches to future global projections. The main advantage of the direct approach in this context is the possibility of using more robust statistical downscaling methods, such as linear regression.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Geologija

Napomena
Financijska potpora: European Commision’s Seventh Framework Programme under CLIM-RUN Project (contract FP7-ENV-2010-265192).

POVEZANOST RADA