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Transferability of optimally-selected climate models in the quantification of climate change impacts on hydrology

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Abstract

Given the ever increasing number of climate change simulations being carried out, it has become impractical to use all of them to cover the uncertainty of climate change impacts. Various methods have been proposed to optimally select subsets of a large ensemble of climate simulations for impact studies. However, the behaviour of optimally-selected subsets of climate simulations for climate change impacts is unknown, since the transfer process from climate projections to the impact study world is usually highly non-linear. Consequently, this study investigates the transferability of optimally-selected subsets of climate simulations in the case of hydrological impacts. Two different methods were used for the optimal selection of subsets of climate scenarios, and both were found to be capable of adequately representing the spread of selected climate model variables contained in the original large ensemble. However, in both cases, the optimal subsets had limited transferability to hydrological impacts. To capture a similar variability in the impact model world, many more simulations have to be used than those that are needed to simply cover variability from the climate model variables’ perspective. Overall, both optimal subset selection methods were better than random selection when small subsets were selected from a large ensemble for impact studies. However, as the number of selected simulations increased, random selection often performed better than the two optimal methods. To ensure adequate uncertainty coverage, the results of this study imply that selecting as many climate change simulations as possible is the best avenue. Where this was not possible, the two optimal methods were found to perform adequately.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Thousand Youth Talents Plan from the Organization Department of CCP Central Committee (Wuhan University, China), the Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51539009), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Hydro-Québec and the Ouranos Consortium on Regional Climatology and Adaptation to Climate Change. The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of the World Climate Research Program Working Group on Coupled Modeling, and to thank all the climate modeling groups listed in Table 1 for making available their respective model outputs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, 299 Bayi Road, Wuchang District, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei, China

    Jie Chen

  2. École de technologie supérieure, Université du Québec, 1100 Notre-Dame Street West, Montreal, QC, H3C 1K3, Canada

    Jie Chen, François P. Brissette & Philippe Lucas-Picher

  3. Centre ESCER, Université du Québec, Case postale 8888, succursale Centre-Ville, Montreal, QC, H3C 3P8, Canada

    Philippe Lucas-Picher

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  1. Jie Chen
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Correspondence to Jie Chen.

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Chen, J., Brissette, F.P. & Lucas-Picher, P. Transferability of optimally-selected climate models in the quantification of climate change impacts on hydrology. Clim Dyn 47, 3359–3372 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3030-x

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