High-performance computing for climate change impact studies with the Pasture Simulation model

2013 ◽  
Vol 98 ◽  
pp. 131-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-André Vital ◽  
Michael Gaurut ◽  
Romain Lardy ◽  
Nicolas Viovy ◽  
Jean-François Soussana ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Simulation Model ◽  
High Performance Computing ◽  
Climate Change Impact ◽  
High Performance ◽  
Impact Studies ◽  
Change Impact ◽  
Performance Computing

scholarly journals The importance of hydrological uncertainty assessment methods in climate change impact studies

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (8) ◽  
pp. 3301-3317 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Honti ◽  
A. Scheidegger ◽  
C. Stamm
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Impact ◽  
Hydrological Model ◽  
Uncertainty Assessment ◽  
Assessment Method ◽  
Calibration Data ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Impact Studies ◽  
Uncertainty Sources ◽  
Change Impact

Abstract. Climate change impact assessments have become more and more popular in hydrology since the middle 1980s with a recent boost after the publication of the IPCC AR4 report. From hundreds of impact studies a quasi-standard methodology has emerged, to a large extent shaped by the growing public demand for predicting how water resources management or flood protection should change in the coming decades. The "standard" workflow relies on a model cascade from global circulation model (GCM) predictions for selected IPCC scenarios to future catchment hydrology. Uncertainty is present at each level and propagates through the model cascade. There is an emerging consensus between many studies on the relative importance of the different uncertainty sources. The prevailing perception is that GCM uncertainty dominates hydrological impact studies. Our hypothesis was that the relative importance of climatic and hydrologic uncertainty is (among other factors) heavily influenced by the uncertainty assessment method. To test this we carried out a climate change impact assessment and estimated the relative importance of the uncertainty sources. The study was performed on two small catchments in the Swiss Plateau with a lumped conceptual rainfall runoff model. In the climatic part we applied the standard ensemble approach to quantify uncertainty but in hydrology we used formal Bayesian uncertainty assessment with two different likelihood functions. One was a time series error model that was able to deal with the complicated statistical properties of hydrological model residuals. The second was an approximate likelihood function for the flow quantiles. The results showed that the expected climatic impact on flow quantiles was small compared to prediction uncertainty. The choice of uncertainty assessment method actually determined what sources of uncertainty could be identified at all. This demonstrated that one could arrive at rather different conclusions about the causes behind predictive uncertainty for the same hydrological model and calibration data when considering different objective functions for calibration.

scholarly journals Fine-resolution climate projections enhance regional climate change impact studies

Eos ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 88 (47) ◽  
pp. 504-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edwin P. Maurer ◽  
Levi Brekke ◽  
Tom Pruitt ◽  
Philip B. Duffy
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Impact ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Change ◽  
Climate Projections ◽  
Impact Studies ◽  
Change Impact ◽  
Fine Resolution

scholarly journals What can we learn from long-term groundwater data to improve climate change impact studies?

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 7621-7655 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Stoll ◽  
H. J. Hendricks Franssen ◽  
R. Barthel ◽  
W. Kinzelbach
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Climate Change Impact ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Groundwater Resources ◽  
Groundwater Dynamics ◽  
Impact Studies ◽  
Change Impact

Abstract. Future risks for groundwater resources, due to global change are usually analyzed by driving hydrological models with the outputs of climate models. However, this model chain is subject to considerable uncertainties. Given the high uncertainties it is essential to identify the processes governing the groundwater dynamics, as these processes are likely to affect groundwater resources in the future, too. Information about the dominant mechanisms can be achieved by the analysis of long-term data, which are assumed to provide insight in the reaction of groundwater resources to changing conditions (weather, land use, water demand). Referring to this, a dataset of 30 long-term time series of precipitation dominated groundwater systems in northern Switzerland and southern Germany is collected. In order to receive additional information the analysis of the data is carried out together with hydrological model simulations. High spatio-temporal correlations, even over large distances could be detected and are assumed to be related to large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. As a result it is suggested to prefer innovative weather-type-based downscaling methods to other stochastic downscaling approaches. In addition, with the help of a qualitative procedure to distinguish between meteorological and anthropogenic causes it was possible to identify processes which dominated the groundwater dynamics in the past. It could be shown that besides the meteorological conditions, land use changes, pumping activity and feedback mechanisms governed the groundwater dynamics. Based on these findings, recommendations to improve climate change impact studies are suggested.

Green Computing

2014 ◽  
pp. 248-260
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Cloud Computing ◽  
High Performance Computing ◽  
High Performance ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Green Computing ◽  
Research Topic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cloud Infrastructures ◽  
Performance Computing

Green computing is a contemporary research topic to address climate and energy challenges. In this chapter, the authors envision the duality of green computing with technological trends in other fields of computing such as High Performance Computing (HPC) and cloud computing on one hand and economy and business on the other hand. For instance, in order to provide electricity for large-scale cloud infrastructures and to reach exascale computing, we need huge amounts of energy. Thus, green computing is a challenge for the future of cloud computing and HPC. Alternatively, clouds and HPC provide solutions for green computing and climate change. In this chapter, the authors discuss this proposition by looking at the technology in detail.

scholarly journals Is bias correction of Regional Climate Model (RCM) simulations possible for non-stationary conditions?

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 12765-12795 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Teutschbein ◽  
J. Seibert
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Bias Correction ◽  
Climate Change Impact ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Climate Conditions ◽  
Impact Studies ◽  
Split Sample ◽  
Sample Test ◽  
Change Impact

Abstract. In hydrological climate-change impact studies, Regional Climate Models (RCMs) are commonly used to transfer large-scale Global Climate Model (GCM) data to smaller scales and to provide more detailed regional information. However, there are often considerable biases in RCM simulations, which have led to the development of a number of bias correction approaches to provide more realistic climate simulations for impact studies. Bias correction procedures rely on the assumption that RCM biases do not change over time, because correction algorithms and their parameterizations are derived for current climate conditions and assumed to apply also for future climate conditions. This underlying assumption of bias stationarity is the main concern when using bias correction procedures. It is in principle not possible to test whether this assumption is actually fulfilled for future climate conditions. In this study, however, we demonstrate that it is possible to evaluate how well bias correction methods perform for conditions different from those used for calibration. For five Swedish catchments, several time series of RCM simulated precipitation and temperature were obtained from the ENSEMBLES data base and different commonly-used bias correction methods were applied. We then performed a differential split-sample test by dividing the data series into cold and warm respective dry and wet years. This enabled us to evaluate the performance of different bias correction procedures under systematically varying climate conditions. The differential split-sample test resulted in a large spread and a clear bias for some of the correction methods during validation years. More advanced correction methods such as distribution mapping performed relatively well even in the validation period, whereas simpler approaches resulted in the largest deviations and least reliable corrections for changed conditions. Therefore, we question the use of simple bias correction methods such as the widely used delta-change approach and linear scaling for RCM-based climate-change impact studies and recommend using higher-skill bias correction methods.

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