A copula based bias correction method of climate data

Generally, Global Climate Models (GCM) cannot be used directly due to their inherent error arising from over or under-estimation of climate variables compared to the observed data. Several bias correction methods have been devised to solve this problem. Most of the traditional bias correction methods are one dimensional as they bias correct the climate variables separately. One such method is the Quantile Mapping method which builds a transfer function based on the statistical differences between the GCM and observed variables. Laux et al. introduced a copula-based method that bias corrects simulated climate data by employing not one but two different climate variables simultaneously and essentially extends the traditional one dimensional method into two dimensions. but it has some limitations. This study uses objective functions to address specifically, the limitations of Laux's methods on the Quantile Mapping method. The objective functions used were the observed rank correlation function, the observed moment function and the observed likelihood function. To illustrate the performance of this method, it is applied to ten GCMs for 20 stations in South Korea. The marginal distributions used were the Weibull, Gamma, Lognormal, Logistic and the Gumbel distributions. The tested copula family include most Archimedean copula families. Five performance metrics are used to evaluate the efficiency of this method, the Mean Square Error, Root Mean Square Error, Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, Percent Bias, Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency and the Kullback Leibler Divergence. The results showed a significant improvement of Laux's method especially when maximizing the observed rank correlation function and when maximizing a combination of the observed rank correlation and observed moments functions for all GCMs in the validation period.