F6. Statistical downscaling of climate: methods and applications for water and the environment

Climate change projections at the regional or catchment scale are increasingly being used by society to determine how best to prepare for expected future changes. This session will focus on presentations that describe the use of new state-of-the-art statistical techniques to downscale global climate model outputs to smaller spatial and temporal scales, as well as recent practical applications which demonstrate the use of downscaling techniques for the assessment of climate impacts and development of adaptation strategies. We thus wish to bring together developers and practitioners of statistical downscaling methods from the climate, hydrology and the environmental sciences. Contributions can include presentations of theoretical/methodological approaches (e.g., stochastic or deterministic; methods that focus on the means or the extremes of climate; Bayesian estimation and other approaches to modeling uncertainty; linear or non-linear modeling; parametric or nonparametric), evaluation and comparison studies between statistical and dynamical methods, and applied downscaling studies in various environmental fields (e.g., hydrology, agriculture, coastal, water supply).Contributions which consider the use of downscaling approaches for decision making and adaptation to future change are also welcomed.