The effect of geographic sampling on evaluation of extreme precipitation in high resolution climate models

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that accounting for geographic sampling of weather stations is crucial for accurately evaluating high-resolution climate models' performance in simulating precipitation extremes, significantly affecting assessment metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate geographic sampling into model evaluation, highlighting its importance for accurate performance assessment of climate models.

Findings

Sampling significantly alters model performance metrics

Ignoring sampling can misrepresent model accuracy

Results are relevant for global land regions with sparse data

Abstract

Traditional approaches for comparing global climate models and observational data products typically fail to account for the geographic location of the underlying weather station data. For modern high-resolution models, this is an oversight since there are likely grid cells where the physical output of a climate model is compared with a statistically interpolated quantity instead of actual measurements of the climate system. In this paper, we quantify the impact of geographic sampling on the relative performance of high resolution climate models' representation of precipitation extremes in Boreal winter (DJF) over the contiguous United States (CONUS), comparing model output from five early submissions to the HighResMIP subproject of the CMIP6 experiment. We find that properly accounting for the geographic sampling of weather stations can significantly change the assessment of model performance. Across the models considered, failing to account for sampling impacts the different metrics (extreme bias, spatial pattern correlation, and spatial variability) in different ways (both increasing and decreasing). We argue that the geographic sampling of weather stations should be accounted for in order to yield a more straightforward and appropriate comparison between models and observational data sets, particularly for high resolution models. While we focus on the CONUS in this paper, our results have important implications for other global land regions where the sampling problem is more severe.