Stochastic downscaling of precipitation: From dry events to heavy rainfalls

Abstract

Downscaling precipitation is a difficult challenge for the climate community. We propose and study a new stochastic weather typing approach to perform such a task. In addition to providing accurate small and medium precipitation, our procedure possesses built‐in features that allow us to model adequately extreme precipitation distributions. First, we propose a new distribution for local precipitation via a probability mixture model of Gamma and Generalized Pareto (GP) distributions. The latter one stems from Extreme Value Theory (EVT). The performance of this mixture is tested on real and simulated data, and also compared to classical rainfall densities. Then our downscaling method, extending the recently developed nonhomogeneous stochastic weather typing approach, is presented. It can be summarized as a three‐step program. First, regional weather precipitation patterns are constructed through a hierarchical ascending clustering method. Second, daily transitions among our precipitation patterns are represented by a nonhomogeneous Markov model influenced by large‐scale atmospheric variables like NCEP reanalyses. Third, conditionally on these regional patterns, precipitation occurrence and intensity distributions are modeled as statistical mixtures. Precipitation amplitudes are assumed to follow our mixture of Gamma and GP densities. The proposed downscaling approach is applied to 37 weather stations in Illinois and compared to various possible parameterizations and to a direct modeling. Model selection procedures show that choosing one GP distribution shape parameter per pattern for all stations provides the best rainfall representation amongst all tested models. This work highlights the importance of EVT distributions to improve the modeling and downscaling of local extreme precipitations.