New Approach to Multisite Downscaling of Precipitation by Identifying Different Set of Atmospheric Predictor Variables

Abstract

Estimating reliable projections of precipitation considering climate change scenarios is important for hydrological studies. General circulation models provide future climate simulations at large scale in terms of large-scale atmospheric variables (LSAVs). Those LSAVs can be downscaled to finer special resolution using several downscaling approaches. This paper presents a support vector regression (SVR)-based downscaling approach to downscale rainfall at several locations in a study area. Because the rainfall generation mechanisms cannot be the same for all the sites in a study area, conventional multisite downscaling approaches that assume the same rainfall generation mechanism should not be used. Therefore, a new downscaling approach is proposed that (1) divides the study area in several climatological regions, and (2) develops different downscaling models for each of the climatological regions to obtain future projections of rainfall. The new approach was implemented on rainfall data obtained for Republic of Ireland to demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach compared with existing approaches. Future projections of rainfall were obtained for the period 2012–2050 corresponding to four Representative Concentration Pathway climate change scenarios. The performance of the SVR approach was compared with that of relevance vector machine– and deep learning–based downscaling approaches.