Global Downscaled Projections for Climate Impacts Research (GDPCIR): Preserving quantile trends for modeling future climate impacts

Abstract

Global climate models (GCMs) are important tools for understanding the climate system and how it is projected to evolve under scenario-driven emissions pathways. Their output is widely used in climate impacts research for modeling the current and future effects of climate change. However, climate model output remains coarse in relation to the high-resolution climate data needed for climate impacts studies, and it also exhibits biases relative to observational data. Treatment of the distribution tails is a key challenge in existing bias-adjusted and downscaled climate datasets available at a global scale; many of these datasets used quantile mapping techniques that were known to dampen or amplify trends in the tails. In this study, we apply the Quantile Delta Mapping (QDM) method for bias adjustment. After bias adjustment, we apply a new spatial downscaling method called Quantile-Preserving Localized-Analog Downscaling (QPLAD), which is designed to preserve trends in the distribution tails. Both methods are integrated into a transparent and reproducible software pipeline, which we apply to global, daily GCM surface variable outputs (maximum and minimum temperature and total precipitation) from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) experiments for the historical experiment and four future emissions scenarios ranging from aggressive mitigation to no mitigation, namely SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0, and SSP5-8.5 . We use the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ERA5 temperature and precipitation reanalysis as the reference dataset over the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) reference period of 1995-2014. We produce bias-adjusted and downscaled data over the historical period (1950-2014) and the future emissions pathways (2015-2100) for 25 GCMs in total. The output dataset is the Global Downscaled Projections for Climate Impacts Research (GDPCIR), a global, daily, 0.25° horizontal-resolution product which is publicly available and hosted on Microsoft AI for Earth's Planetary Computer (https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/dataset/group/cil-gdpcir/, last access: 23 October 2023).