Statistical Downscaling and Bias Correction for Climate Research

Douglas Maraun is an associate professor and Head of the Regional Climate Modelling Group at the Wegener Center for Climate and Global Change at the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Austria. His research interests include the processes governing local extreme events, assessing uncertainties of regional climate projections, and statistical post-processing of climate simulations for adaptation planning. He chaired the VALUE network which carried out the most comprehensive inter-comparison and evaluation of different downscaling approaches, and is involved in steering activities of the international downscaling initiative CORDEX. Martin Widmann is a senior lecturer and climate scientist in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. His current main research area is regional climate change, in particular the development and validation of statistical downscaling methods. He was one of the first to apply bias correction in a climate change context, and recently co-chaired the VALUE network. His other field of research is past climates, in particular the development of data assimilation methods to combine climate simulations with empirical knowledge from proxy data.

Preface; Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; Part I. Background and Fundamentals: 2. Regional climate; 3. History of downscaling; 4. Rationale of downscaling; 5. User needs; 6. Mathematical and statistical methods; 7. Reference observations; 8. Climate modelling; 9. Uncertainties; Part II. Statistical Downscaling Concepts and Methods: 10. Structure of statistical downscaling methods; 11. Perfect prognosis; 12. Model output statistics; 13. Weather generators; 14. Other approaches; Part III. Downscaling in Practice and Outlook: 15. Evaluation; 16. Performance of statistical downscaling; 17. A regional modelling debate; 18. Use of downscaling in practice; 19. Outlook; Appendix A. Methods used in this book; Appendix B. Useful resources; References; Index.