Regional precipitation and temperature scenarios for climate change

Abstract

To investigate the consequences of climate change on the water budget in small catchments, it is necessary to know the change of local precipitation and temperature. General Circulation Models (GCM) cannot provide regional climate parameters yet, because of their coarse resolution and imprecise modelling of precipitation. Therefore downscaling of precipitation and temperature has to be carried out from the GCM grids to a small scale of a few square kilometres. Daily rainfall and temperature are modelled as processes conditioned on atmospheric circulation. Rainfall is linked to the circulation patterns (CPs) using conditional probabilities and conditional rainfall amount distribution. Both temperature and precipitation are downscaled to several locations simultaneously taking into account the CP dependent spatial correlation. Temperature is modelled using a simple autoregressive approach, conditioned on atmospheric circulation and local areal precipitation. The model uses the classification scheme of the German Weather Service and a fuzzy rule-based classification. It was applied in the Aller catchment for validation using observed rainfall and temperature, and observed classified geopotential pressure heights. GCM scenarios of the ECHAM model were used to make climate change predictions (using classified GCM geopotential heights); simulated values agree fairly well with historical data. Results for different GCM scenarios are shown.