Evaluating NARCCAP model performance for frequencies of severe-storm environments

Given the fine-scale nature of the phenomena, such changes can only be analyzed indirectly, for example, through large-scale indicators of environments conducive to severe weather. Climate models can account for changing physics over time, but if they cannot capture the relevant distributional properties of the current climate, then their use for inferring future regimes is limited.

In this study, high-resolution climate models from the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) are evaluated for the present climate state using cutting-edge spatial verification techniques recently popularized in the meteorology literature. While climate models are not intended to predict variables on a day-by-day basis, like weather models, they should be expected to mimic distributional properties of these processes, which is how they are increasingly used and therefore this study assesses the degree to which the models are actually suitable for this purpose.