Multivariate bias corrections of climate simulations: which benefits for which losses?

Abstract

Climate models are the major tools to study the climate system and its evolutions in the future. However, climate simulations often present statistical biases and have to be corrected against observations before being used in impact assessments. Several bias correction (BC) methods have therefore been developed in the literature over the last 2 decades, in order to adjust simulations according to historical records and obtain climate projections with appropriate statistical attributes. Most of the existing and popular BC methods are univariate, i.e., correcting one physical variable and one location at a time and, thus, can fail to reconstruct inter-variable, spatial or temporal dependencies of the observations. These remaining biases in the correction can then affect the subsequent analyses. This has led to further research on multivariate aspects for statistical postprocessing BC methods. Recently, some multivariate bias correction (MBC) methods have been proposed, with different approaches to restore multidimensional dependencies. However, these methods are not yet fully apprehended by researchers and practitioners due to differences in their applicability and assumptions, therefore leading potentially to different results. This study is intended to intercompare four existing MBCs to provide end users with aid in choosing such methods for their applications. For evaluation and illustration purposes, these methods are applied to correct simulation outputs from one climate model through a cross-validation method, which allows for the assessment of inter-variable, spatial and temporal criteria. Then, a second cross-validation method is performed for assessing the ability of the MBC methods to account for the multidimensional evolutions of the climate model. Additionally, two reference datasets are used to assess the influence of their spatial resolution on (M)BC results. Most of the methods reasonably correct inter-variable and intersite correlations. However, none of them adjust correctly the temporal structure as they generate bias-corrected data with usually weak temporal dependencies compared to observations. Major differences are found concerning the applicability and stability of the methods in high-dimensional contexts and in their capability to reproduce the multidimensional changes in the model. Based on these conclusions, perspectives for MBC developments are suggested, such as methods to adjust not only multivariate correlations but also temporal structures and allowing multidimensional evolutions of the model to be accounted for in the correction.