Reply to “Comments on ‘The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program: Overview of Phase I Results’”

Journal Article · Mon Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2013 · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(7):1077-1078

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00013.1· OSTI ID:1091465

Mearns, L. O.; Bukovsky, Melissa; Leung, Lai-Yung R.; Qian, Yun; Arritt, R.; Gutowski, William; Takle, Eugene S.; Biner, S.; Caya, Daniel; Jones, Richard; Sloan, Lisa; Snyder, Mark A.

The authors of Mearns et al. (2012) are well aware of the role of driving RCMs with reanalyses and have written extensively on the roles of different types of RCM simulations (e.g., Giorgi and Mearns, 1999; Leung et al., 2003). Thus, we agree that the skill of dynamical downscaling in which global reanalysis is used to provide boundary conditions in general indicates an upper bound of skill compared to dynamical downscaling in which the boundary conditions come from global climate model simulations. This finding has long been established as global climate model simulations cannot outperform global reanalysis in providing boundary conditions since the latter is constrained by observations through data assimilation (that is unless the reanalyses themselves have been shown to have serious deficiences, e.g. Cerezo-Mota et al, 2011). The classification of different types of dynamical downscaling introduced by Castro et al. (2005) further adds clarity to this point.

• Research Organization: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Richland, WA (US)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE
• DOE Contract Number: AC05-76RL01830
• OSTI ID: 1091465
• Report Number(s): PNNL-SA-93026; KP1703010
• Journal Information: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(7):1077-1078, Journal Name: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(7):1077-1078
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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