Using regional wind‐inducing circulation patterns to estimate future rainfall

The complex connections that drive Earth's changing climate are most easily understood on a broad scale, where rising temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and shifting greenhouse gas concentrations can be examined through changes in the statistical average. Zooming in on the predictions of general circulation models (GCMs) to understand the consequences at local scales, however, is far more difficult, as regional anomalies drive the local climate away from the global norm. Modeling future precipitation at the watershed scale is a pressing challenge, hindered by the fact that regional interpretations tend to incorporate the biases of the larger GCMs on which they base their data. To improve understanding of regional precipitation in a changing climate,Bárdossy and Pegram developed a technique to translate GCM predictions into local forecasts while also correcting for some of the inherent bias.