Future projections of daily precipitation and its extremes in simulations of 21st century climate change

textThe current generation of climate models in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) is used to assess the future changes in daily precipitation and its extremes. The simple average of all the models, i.e. the multi-model ensemble mean (MMEM), has been widely used due to its simplicity and better performance than most individual models. Weighting techniques are also proposed to deal with the systematic biases within the models. However, both methods are designed to reduce the uncertainties for the study of climate mean state. They will induce problems when the climate extremes are of interest. We utilize a Bayesian weighting method to investigate the rainfall mean state and perform a probability density function based assessment of daily rainfall extremes. Satellite measurement is used to evaluate the short historical period. The weighting method can be only applied to regions rather than hemispheric scale, and thus three tropical regions including the Amazon, Congo, and Southeast Asia are studied. The method based on the Gamma distribution for daily precipitation is demonstrated to perform much better than the MMEM with respect to the extreme events. A use of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic for the distribution assessment indicates the method is more applicable in three tropical wet regions over land mentioned above. This is consistent with previous studies showing the Gamma distribution is more suitable for daily rainfall in wet regions. Both methods provide consistent results. The three regions display significant changes at the end of the 21st century. The Amazon will be drier, while the Congo will not have large changes in mean rainfall. However, both of the Amazon and Congo will have large rainfall variability, implying more droughts and floods. The Amazon will have 7.5% more little-rain days (defined as > 0.5 mm/d) and 4.5 mm/d larger 95th percentile for 2092-2099, and the Congo will have 2.5% more little-rain days and 1 mm/d larger 95th percentile. Southeast Asia will be dryer in the western part and wetter in the eastern part, which is consistent with the different changes in the 5th percentile. It will also experience heavier rainfall events with much larger increases in the 95th percentile. The future changes, especially the increase in rainfall extremes, are very likely associated with the strengthening of hydrological cycle.Statistic