Bayesian Hierarchical Modeling of Extremes from Regional Climate Model Simulations
Dan Cooley1 Stephan Sain2
1Department of Statistics, Colorado State University
2Geophysical Statistics Project,
National Center for Atmospheric Research
Climate and Weather
“Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get”
Instead: Climate is the distribution from which weather is drawn (not just the expected value).
General goal: To characterize the upper tail of the climate distribution for precipitation.
Complication: Any data is a combination of climate and weather effects.
Climate Models
Tools for simulating weather under different climate condi- tions. Discretized series of differential equations.
General Circulation Models
• model large-scale processes over entire globe
• grid boxes on scale of 100’s of km’s
Regional Climate Models
• try to resolve smaller-scale processes over a region
• grid boxes on scale of 10’s of km’s
• driven by GCM’s
• better for studying local impacts