A comparison of U.S. precipitation extremes under RCP8.5 and RCP4.5 with an application of pattern scaling

Miranda J. Fix (), Daniel Cooley, Stephan R. Sain and Claudia Tebaldi
Additional contact information
Miranda J. Fix: Colorado State University
Daniel Cooley: Colorado State University
Stephan R. Sain: The Climate Corporation
Claudia Tebaldi: National Center for Atmospheric Research

Climatic Change, 2018, vol. 146, issue 3, No 5, 335-347

Abstract: Abstract Precipitation extremes are expected to increase in a warming climate, which may have serious societal impacts. This study uses two initial condition ensembles conducted with the Community Earth System Model (CESM) to investigate potential changes in extreme precipitation under two climate change scenarios over the contiguous United States. We fit non-stationary generalized extreme value (GEV) models to annual maximum daily precipitation simulated from a 30-member ensemble under the RCP8.5 scenario and a 15-member ensemble under the RCP4.5 scenario. We then compare impacts using the 1 % annual exceedance probability (AEP) level, which is the amount of daily rainfall with only a 1 % chance of being exceeded in a given year. Under RCP8.5 between 2005 and 2080, the 1 % AEP level is projected to increase by 17 % on average across the U.S., and up to 36 % for some grid cells. Compared to RCP8.5 in the year 2080, RCP4.5 is projected to reduce the 1 % AEP level by 7 % on average, with reductions as large as 18 % for some grid cells. We also investigate a pattern scaling approach in which we produce predictive GEV distributions of annual precipitation maxima under RCP4.5 given only global mean temperatures for this scenario. We compare results from this less computationally intensive method to those obtained from our GEV model fitted directly to the CESM RCP4.5 output and find that pattern scaling produces reasonable projections.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10584-016-1656-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:146:y:2018:i:3:d:10.1007_s10584-016-1656-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-016-1656-7

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().