Abstract
Selecting the appropriate climate models and determining their strengths and weaknesses are the key steps in examining climate change impacts on water resources. In this paper, the efficiency of monthly, seasonal, and annual precipitation estimations by 21 Global Climate Models (GCMs) provided by the NASA Earth Exchange Global Daily Downscaled Projections dataset (NEX-GDDP) was evaluated against the Observational Precipitation (OP) of 50 synoptic stations located in eight Precipitation Zones (PZs) of Iran. First, the average of GCMs precipitation for the period 1976–2005 was evaluated vs the OP data at both PZ and national levels. Then the efficiency of the GCMs and their Ensemble Average (EA) in estimating monthly, seasonal, and annual precipitation were determined using NSE, NRMSE, KGE, and PBIAS statistics, and subsequently, the GCMs were ranked according to their statistics. The results show that the time variability of the GCMs’ average annual precipitation agrees with that of the OP, but it underestimates the extreme values. The agreement of the models’ estimations with observation is generally lowest in summer and the highest in winter and spring. Most of the GCMs show a lower ability in precipitation estimation in dry seasons than in wet seasons. EA of the models for all individual months shows the highest errors in the coastal areas of the Caspian Sea, especially for the spring and winter seasons. The examination of the GCMs’ efficiency at the national level shows that the EA and GFDL-ESM2G models have the least errors at monthly and annual time scales, respectively.
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Data availability
The NEX-GDDP datasets analyzed during the current study are available at https://cds.nccs.nasa.gov/nex-gddp/.
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Acknowledgements
Climate scenarios were extracted from the NEX-GDDP dataset, prepared by the Climate Analytics Group and NASA Ames Research Center using the NASA Earth Exchange, and distributed by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS). The observational precipitation data used in this study was also provided by Iran’s Meteorological Organization (IRIMO). NASA and IRIMO are highly appreciated for providing the data. The authors also appreciate very much the respective anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that greatly improved the quality of the representation of the study.
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Ghalami, V., Saghafian, B. & Raziei, T. An appraisal of the NEX-GDDP precipitation dataset across homogeneous precipitation sub-regions of Iran. Theor Appl Climatol 152, 347–369 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-023-04399-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-023-04399-z