A Multi-Model Assessment of the Spatial Resolution Impact on the Emergent Relationship Between Extreme Precipitation Intensity and Local Temperature.
Past observation-based studies have revealed a well-defined pattern of extreme precipitation intensity variation with near-surface air temperature and humidity. Earth system models have limited skills in capturing such emergent relationships, and the sources of model biases remain poorly understood. This study aims to assess the impact of model spatial resolution on the relationship between extreme precipitation with near-surface air temperature and atmospheric saturation deficit, and to evaluate its model dependence. Our primary analyses were conducted based on 3-hourly output from the E3SM model at two different spatial resolutions (25km and 100km) and from the SCREAM model (3km), which is the convection-permitting version of the E3SM. In comparison with the E3SM model results, we also analyzed the 3-hourly output from HadGEM3 and EC-Earth3 models, each at two different spatial resolutions. We performed both univariate analyses on how extreme precipitation (e.g., 99.9th percentile) scales with near-surface air temperature and bivariate analyses on how extreme precipitation scales with near-surface air temperature and saturation deficit at the weather timescale. Results from E3SM showed that the scaling relationships from coarse and fine-resolution models are qualitatively and quantitatively similar. Although finer-resolution models may perform better in simulating some characteristics of precipitation, they show slight improvement in reproducing the emergent relationship of extreme precipitation intensity with temperature and saturation deficit, especially the scaling rate of extreme precipitation intensity with temperature in a saturated atmosphere. This presentation will focus on comparing the scaling relationships at different resolutions of the three earth system models chosen based on sub-daily data availability.