Statistical downscaling techniques for reliable projections of climate change impacts in environment and economical costs

Annotation

A Spanish technology-based company specialized in reliable projections of climate change impacts in environmental and economic costs offers its advanced statistical downscaling techniques to develop new services and products to companies and governments interested in responding more effectively to the demanding challenge of adaptation to climate change. They offer their services under a subcontracting agreement.

Offer description

The Spanish technology-based company specialized in climate and meteorology was founded by the senior research group at a Spanish university. The group has transferred to the company its wide experience in participating in high-quality standard European, Spanish and regional projects. Within this framework, the senior researchers have developed new knowledge and novel applications for climate change assessment. All these results have been published as numerous research articles in high-impact international journals. This transfer of research experience, knowledge and technology allows to the firm having at its disposal advanced and internationally recognized techniques for the analysis of climate change impacts at local and regional scales. The company offers subcontracting services to companies for scenario modelling on climate data, climate change assessment, studies on the potential of renewable energy at micro and macroscale, early warning alerts, risk management, greenhouse gas levels, etc. Atmosphere ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) constitute the primary tool to produce future climate projections. AOGCM simulations have been run under a wide range of scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions and aerosols. These scenarios describe plausible evolutions for these emissions depending on socioeconomic conditions and world development guidelines. Although these models are suitable to provide future global climate scenarios, their coarse spatial resolutions are not appropriate to evaluate most regional and local impacts. Climate change is a problem of global causes and consequences but its impacts become apparent locally. Dynamical downscaling applied to AOGCM outputs attempts to account for the effects of mesoscale forcings and other features by nesting increased-resolution regional climate models (RCMs) in large-scale meteorological fields generated by general climate models. Regional effects can exert a particularly strong influence on the distribution of climate variables. Although regional climate modelling often improves the performance from AOGCMs at regional scales, the resolution still remains inadequate to address uncertainties arising from several sources (e.g., clouds, convection, boundary layer or radiative transfer). Nowadays, multimodel ensemble strategies are used to better encompass uncertainties arising from RCM errors and boundary conditions. Prior to properly use climate model outputs at local and regional scales, it is first advisable to correct possible biases and errors. Reliable projections of weather variables and their derivatives are required from RCMs in order to estimate future climate change impacts. Several advanced statistical downscaling techniques exist to adjust RCM projections, taking local forcings into consideration. The company applies a quantile-quantile (Q-Q) mapping transformation that has been widely used for correcting biases in the simulated meteorological variables at regional and local scales.

Innovations and advantages

Services offered come as a result of the research of a group of scientists with extensive international experience in the field of meteorology, air quality, hydrology and climatology. These tools are both highly interesting and very useful for government and business management. Furthermore, the group has an extensive experience in advising adaptation and mitigation policies, as well as in producing action plans on climate change impacts regional and local level. The senior researches have also participated in working groups and negotiations at national, European and UNFCCC level on mitigation, adaptation and emission trading.

Technology keywords

01004006 Environment Management Systems
05002 Meteorology / Climatology
10002004 Climate Change mitigation
10002007 Environmental Engineering / Technology
10002009 Natural Disasters

Market application codes

06 ENERGY
09008001 Electric companies

Profile date

16.03.2019