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

Abstract

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.

Authors:
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Publication Date:
Research Org.:
Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
Sponsoring Org.:
USDOE
OSTI Identifier:
1091465
Report Number(s):
PNNL-SA-93026
KP1703010
DOE Contract Number:  
AC05-76RL01830
Resource Type:
Journal Article
Journal Name:
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(7):1077-1078
Additional Journal Information:
Journal Name: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(7):1077-1078
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Subject:
response; Pielke; commentary; Mearns; 2012

Citation Formats

Mearns, L. O., Bukovsky, Melissa, Leung, Lai-Yung R., Qian, Yun, Arritt, R., Gutowski, William, Takle, Eugene S., Biner, S., Caya, Daniel, Correia Jr., James, Jones, Richard, Sloan, Lisa, and Snyder, Mark A. Reply to “Comments on ‘The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program: Overview of Phase I Results’”. United States: N. p., 2013. Web. doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00013.1.
Mearns, L. O., Bukovsky, Melissa, Leung, Lai-Yung R., Qian, Yun, Arritt, R., Gutowski, William, Takle, Eugene S., Biner, S., Caya, Daniel, Correia Jr., James, Jones, Richard, Sloan, Lisa, & Snyder, Mark A. Reply to “Comments on ‘The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program: Overview of Phase I Results’”. United States. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00013.1
Mearns, L. O., Bukovsky, Melissa, Leung, Lai-Yung R., Qian, Yun, Arritt, R., Gutowski, William, Takle, Eugene S., Biner, S., Caya, Daniel, Correia Jr., James, Jones, Richard, Sloan, Lisa, and Snyder, Mark A. 2013. "Reply to “Comments on ‘The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program: Overview of Phase I Results’”". United States. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00013.1.
@article{osti_1091465,
title = {Reply to “Comments on ‘The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program: Overview of Phase I Results’”},
author = {Mearns, L. O. and Bukovsky, Melissa and Leung, Lai-Yung R. and Qian, Yun and Arritt, R. and Gutowski, William and Takle, Eugene S. and Biner, S. and Caya, Daniel and Correia Jr., James and Jones, Richard and Sloan, Lisa and Snyder, Mark A.},
abstractNote = {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.},
doi = {10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00013.1},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1091465}, journal = {Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(7):1077-1078},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Mon Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013},
month = {Mon Jul 01 00:00:00 EDT 2013}
}