Improved Projections through Dynamical Downscaling

Paraphrasing Senator Tip O’Neill: All climate change is local. Simulating climate and climate change in local scales, however, is challenging. Earth System models cannot attain the resolution needed to represent local processes, spatial features or feedbacks between processes. We show that high-resolution convection permitting downscaling of climate reanalyses using a high-resolution regional model improves both the means and extremes of temperature and precipitation in the northeastern U.S. We then apply the downscaling to climate projections for the middle and end of the 21^stcentury under emissions pathway RCP 8.5 to help assess regional impacts.