Evaluation of Precipitation Indices in Suites of Dynamically and Statistically Downscaled Regional Climate Models Over Florida
Simulation of precipitation indices, defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and indices (ETCCDI), is examined in suites of dynamically and statistically downscaled regional climate models and reanalyses over Florida.
Florida is barely resolved in "coarse-resolution" global climate models (horizontal grid spacing ~100 km or more), and Florida’s hydroclimate is greatly influenced by mesoscale events of the order of 10–1000 km. This study examines the simulation of precipitation indices in high-resolution datasets.
The present work evaluates historical precipitation and its indices defined by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI) in suites of dynamically and statistically downscaled regional climate models (RCMs) against NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network Daily (GHCN-Daily) dataset over Florida. The study shows that most of the dynamically downscaled regional climate models underestimate the magnitude of precipitation and the frequency of extreme rainfall in summer over Florida. The large uncertainty across model datasets is comparable to that in the reanalysis datasets.