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

Journal Article · · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(7):1077-1078

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 Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
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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