Spatial downscaling of rainfall from general circulation models: A chaos theory-based framework

The present study proposes a new chaos theory-based local approximation technique for the spatial downscaling of rainfall from GCM outputs. The approach involves: (1) reconstruction of relevant climate data in the state space using an embedding technique; and (2) use of a neighbor search procedure in the reconstructed space and local approximation for downscaling. The approach is implemented for downscaling of monthly rainfall at a spatial resolution of 0.25° × 0.25° across India. The effectiveness of the approach is first demonstrated using the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis dataset (1979–2014) and then tested using the outputs from five CMIP6 GCMs (CMCC-ESM2, CESM2-WACCM, CMCC-CM2-HR4, E3SM-1-1-ECA, and BCC-ESM1) (1961–2014). Eight climate variables (eastward wind, northward wind, relative humidity, specific humidity, surface temperature, air temperature, sea level pressure, and geopotential height) are considered as predictors, with the observed rainfall data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) as the predictand. Three statistical measures, namely correlation coefficient (CC), Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), and normalized root mean square error (NRMSE), are used for evaluation. The results indicate that the local approximation downscaling approach yields promising results for both reanalysis dataset and GCM outputs. Among the five GCMs, the CMCC-ESM2 model yields the best results. Comparison of the results from the chaos theory-based approach with those of the linear regression-based approach indicates better performance of the former. The proposed framework is general and can be applied for any climate variable, GCM, and region. •A chaos theory approach is proposed for spatial rainfall downscaling of GCM outputs.•It involves embedding of climate data, neighbor search, and local approximation.•It is implemented for spatial downscaling of monthly rainfall across India.•Performance is assessed for reanalysis dataset and outputs from five GCMs.•Chaos theory-based downscaling approach outperforms linear regression method.