Evaluation of climate change impacts on extreme rainfall events characteristics using a synoptic weather typing-based daily precipitation downscaling model

Abstract

Climate change has impacted all phenomena in the hydrologic cycle, especially extreme events. General circulation models (GCMs) are used to investigate climate change impacts but because of their low resolution, downscaling methods are developed to provide data with high enough resolution for regional studies from GCM outputs. The performance of rainfall downscaling methods is commonly acceptable in preserving average characteristics, but they do not preserve the extreme event characteristics especially rainfall amount and distribution. In this study, a novel downscaling method called synoptic statistical downscaling model is proposed for daily precipitation downscaling with an emphasis on extreme event characteristics preservation. The proposed model is applied to a region located in central Iran. The results show that the developed model can downscale all percentiles of precipitation events with an acceptable performance and there is no assumption about the similarity of future rainfall data with the historical observations. The outputs of CCSM4 GCM for two representative concentration pathways (RCPs) of RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 are used to investigate the climate change impacts in the study region. The results show 40% and 30% increase in the number of extreme rainfall events under RCP4.5 and RCP8.5, respectively.