“Which Projections Do I Use?” Strategies for Climate Model Ensemble Subset Selection Based on Regional Stakeholder Needs

Abstract

Climate model (or earth system model) projections are increasingly used for climate adaptation planning and impact assessments. As part of this process, many end-users evaluate a subset of downscaled climate projections without being aware of the implications of downscaling methodology for statistics or event outcomes. Approaches for determining a subset of global climate models to use often focus on values from the raw models, rather than from their downscaled counterparts, in other words assuming that the statistical distribution of the multi-model ensemble does not change post downscaling. This study demonstrates that a downscaled ensemble will typically retain the change distribution as a raw ensemble, but individual models can differ dramatically post-downscaling. We recommend that subset-selection methods account for this possibility and that decision-relevant downscaled climate projections provide proper descriptions of fitness-for-purpose and essential caveats, so that non-specialists can interpret the results with an appropriate level of confidence.