Evaluation of a bias correction method applied to downscaled.pdfVIP

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 14, 687–703, 2010 Hydrology and /14/687/2010/ © Author(s) 2010. This work is distributed under Earth System the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Sciences Evaluation of a bias correction method applied to downscaled precipitation and temperature reanalysis data for the Rhine basin 1 1,* 1 1 W. Terink , R. T. W. L. Hurkmans , P. J. J. F. Torfs , and R. Uijlenhoet 1Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands * now at: Bristol Glaciology Centre, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK Received: 23 December 2009 – Published in Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss.: 13 January 2010 Revised: 6 April 2010 – Accepted: 8 April 2010 – Published: 22 April 2010 Abstract. In many climate impact studies hydrological mod- 1 Introduction els are forced with meteorological data without an attempt to assess the quality of these data. The objective of this study Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are an important source of was to compare downscaled ERA15 (ECMWF-reanalysis climate input for hydrological models. RCMs are often em- data) precipitation and temperature with observed precipi- ployed for downscaling General Circulation Model (GCM) tation and temperature and apply a bias correction to these output and reanalysis data. Hydrological models are sub- forcing variables. Precipitation is corrected by fitting it to sequently forced with RCM data to address the impact of the mean and coefficient of variation (CV) of the ob