Search

General circulation models (GCMs) are developed to simulate the past climate and generate future climate predictions. In the context of global warming, their important roles in identifying possible solutions to water resources planning/management are recognized by the world. However, in actual and regional implementation, due to many factors like initial and boundary conditions, parameters and model structures and so forth, there are great variabilities and uncertainties across the future climate projections of GCMs outputs, which has attracted criticism from water resources planners. Thus, the GCMs usually must be evaluated for assessing their performances in simulating the historical observations. Currently, there are many different conclusions and opinions as to whether the optimal individual model is more advantageous or whether the combined consideration of MME works better. The purpose of this paper is to compare the advantages and disadvantages between the selection of the optimal single GCM and multi‐model ensemble (MME) based on one of the more objective selection methods called TOPSIS. The results show that the performances of GCMs in simulating precipitation and temperature in different climate subregions over China are not identical. For CMIP6 GCMs simulations, the optimal precipitation GCM is CMCC‐CM2‐SR5 for EC, MIROC6 for SC, SWC and NWC, CESM2‐WACCM for NC and NEC, and FGOALS‐g3 for QTP. As for temperature, only NESM3 and BCC‐ESM1 are the optimal GCM for QTP and NWC, respectively; in other subregions, MME is better than single GCM. In general, a simple arithmetic averaging approach employed to generate the MME model is not superior to the optimal GCM, although the error metric with the observed data is reduced, at the cost of a severe compression of the interannual variability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The biases in the Global Circulation Models ( GCMs) are crucial for understanding future climate changes. Currently, most bias correction methodologies suffer from the assumption that model bias is stationary. This paper provides a non-stationary bias correction model, termed residual-based bagging tree ( RBT) model, to reduce simulation biases and to quantify the contributions of single models. Specifically, the proposed model estimates the residuals between individual models and observations, and takes the differences between observations and the ensemble mean into consideration during the model training process. A case study is conducted for 10 major river basins in Mainland China during different seasons. Results show that the proposed model is capable of providing accurate and stable predictions while including the non-stationarities into the modelling framework. Significant reductions in both bias and root mean squared error are achieved with the proposed RBT model, especially for the central and western parts of China. The proposed RBT model has consistently better performance in reducing biases when compared with the raw ensemble mean, the ensemble mean with simple additive bias correction, and the single best model for different seasons. Furthermore, the contribution of each single GCM in reducing the overall bias is quantified. The single model importance varies between 3.1% and 7.2%. For different future scenarios ( RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, and RCP 8.5), the results from RBT model suggest temperature increases of 1.44, 2.59, and 4.71 °C by the end of the century, respectively, when compared with the average temperature during 1970-1999. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]