Speaker: Dave Lorenz, Senior Scientist, Center for Climatic Research, UW–Madison
NOAA is currently updating Atlas 14 precipitation frequency estimates nationwide. As part of this process, information on future precipitation extremes will be incorporated. This talk discusses the methodology used to statistically downscale future climate projections for NOAA. Some topics discussed are: 1) the importance of a probabilistic rather deterministic downscaling approach to capture realistic extremes, 2) the incorporation of a physically-based but computationally feasible orographic precipitation model into the downscaling, 3) the dependence of the shape of the precipitation Probability Density Function (PDF) on large-scale predictors, 4) how PDF shape should be adjusted to account for non-stationarity when applying the downscaling to future climate model projections and 5) a summary of future climate projections from the downscaling.