Comparison of Continuous and Quantile-Based Downscaling Approaches to Evaluate the Climate Change Impacts on Characteristics of Extreme Rainfall
Publication: Geo-Extreme 2021
ABSTRACT
Extreme precipitation events can cause flooding leading to severe socioeconomic and environmental impacts. Drawing on General Climate Model (GCMs) projections, an assessment of the potential impacts of climate change on the characteristics of extreme precipitation events was undertaken. Statistical downscaling approaches, along with temporal disaggregation techniques, were implemented to estimate continuous precipitation series at fine spatiotemporal scales, allowing extreme precipitation events to be extracted. Quantile-based downscaling approaches have recently been applied to estimate future extreme precipitation quantiles through empirical relationships between GCM and observed precipitation quantiles. It remains unclear how these two approaches differ from one another in terms of their projections. In this study, two quantile- and one continuous-based approaches were employed to estimate the future extreme precipitation quantiles in Montréal, Canada. These downscaling approaches provided an acceptable performance during the historical period; however, their estimates of the sign and magnitude of future extreme precipitation quantile changes differed considerably.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this chapter.
REFERENCES
Arnbjerg-Nielsen, K., Willems, P., Olsson, J., Beecham, S., Pathirana, A., Bülow Gregersen, I., and Nguyen, V. T. V. (2013). “Impacts of climate change on rainfall extremes and urban drainage systems: a review”. Water Sci Technol, 68(1), 16–28.
Chun, K. P., Wheater, H. S., Nazemi, A., and Khaliq, M. N. (2013). “Precipitation downscaling in Canadian Prairie Provinces using the LARS-WG and GLM approaches”. Can. Water Resour. J, 38(4), 311–332.
Dai, F. C., Lee, C. F., and Ngai, Y. Y. (2002). “Landslide risk assessment and management: an overview”. Eng. Geol., 64(1), 65–87.
Eekhout, J. P., Hunink, J. E., Terink, W., and de Vente, J. (2018). “Why increased extreme precipitation under climate change negatively affects water security”. Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22(11), 5935–5946.
Elshorbagy, A., Nazemi, A., and Alam, S. (2015). “Analyzing the variations in intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) curves in the city of Saskatoon under climate change.”, Centre for Advanced Numerical simulation (CANSIM), Department of Civil & Geological Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada, pp. 167. CAN-15-01.pdf.
Hassan, Z., Shamsudin, S., and Harun, S. (2014). “Application of SDSM and LARS-WG for simulating and downscaling of rainfall and temperature”. Theor. Appl. Climatol, 116(1-2), 243–257.
Hassanzadeh, E., Nazemi, A., and Elshorbagy, A. (2014). “Quantile-based downscaling of precipitation using genetic programming: Application to IDF curves in Saskatoon”. J. Hydrol. Eng., 19(5), 943–955.
Hassanzadeh, E., Nazemi, A., Adamowski, J., Nguyen, T. H., and Van-Nguyen, V. T. (2019). “Quantile-based downscaling of rainfall extremes: notes on methodological functionality, associated uncertainty and application in practice”. Adv Water Resour, 131, 103371.
Jaramillo, P., and Nazemi, A. (2018). “Assessing urban water security under changing climate: Challenges and ways forward”. Sustain Cities Soc., 41, 907–918.
Katz, R. (2012). Statistical methods for nonstationary extremes.Extremes in a changing climate: Detection, analysis and uncertainty, A. AghaKouchak, D. Easterling, K. Hsu, S. Schubert, and S. Sorooshian, eds., Springer, Dordrecht, Netherlands.
Lall, U., and Sharma A. (1996). “A nearest neighbor bootstrap for time series resampling”. Water Resour. Res., 32(3), 679–693.
Maraun, D., and Widmann, M. (2018). Statistical downscaling and bias correction for climate research. Cambridge University Press.
Nazemi, A. R., Elshorbagy, A., and Pingale, S. (2011). “Uncertainties in the estimation of future annual extreme daily rainfall for the city of Saskatoon under climate change effects.” Proc. CSCE 20th Canadian, Hydrotechnical Conf. (CD-ROM), Ottawa, ON, Canada.
Sandink, D., Simonovic, S. P., Schardong, A., and Srivastav, R. (2016). “A decision support system for updating and incorporating climate change impacts into rainfall intensity-duration-frequency curves: Review of the stakeholder involvement process”. Environ Modell Softw, 84, 193–209.
Semenov, M. A., and Barrow, E. M. (1997). “Use of a stochastic weather generator in the development of climate change scenarios”. Clim. Change, 35(4), 397–414.
Semenov, M. A., Barrow, E. M., and Lars-Wg, A. (2002). A stochastic weather generator for use in climate impact studies. User Man Herts UK.
Sharif, M., and Burn, D. H. (2007). “Improved K-nearest neighbor weather generating model”. J. Hydrol. Eng., 12(1), 42–51.
Simonovic, S. P., Schardong, A., Sandink, D., and Srivastav, R. (2016). “A web-based tool for the development of intensity duration frequency curves under changing climate”. Environ Modell Softw, 81, 136–153.
Tabari, H. (2020). “Climate change impact on flood and extreme precipitation increases with water availability”. Sci. Rep, 10(1), 1–10.
Uraba, M. B., Gunawardhana, L. N., Al-Rawas, G. A., and Baawain, M. S. (2019). “A downscaling-disaggregation approach for developing IDF curves in arid regions”. Environ. Monit. Assess., 191(4), 245.
Winter, M. G., Shearer, B., Palmer, D., Peeling, D., Harmer, C., and Sharpe, J. (2016). “The economic impact of landslides and floods on the road network”. Procedia Eng., 143, 1425–1434.
Yeo, M. H., Nguyen, V. T. V., and Kpodonu, T. A. (2020). “Characterizing extreme rainfalls and constructing Confidence Intervals for IDF curves using Scaling‐GEV distribution model”. Int J Climatol., 1–13.
Yuan, X., Wang, L., Wu, P., Ji, P., Sheffield, J., and Zhang, M. (2019). “Anthropogenic shift towards higher risk of flash drought over China”. Nat. Commun, 10(1), 1–8.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
© 2021 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Published online: Nov 4, 2021
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.