A global climate model can tell you how much wetter Accra might get by 2050. What it can't tell you is whether next Tuesday will bring rain. That gap between long-run statistics and the day-to-day sequences that hydrologists, farmers, and public health planners actually need is what a new tool from then SPRINGS project closes.
The tool is a weather generator: software that takes downscaled climate statistics: averages, probabilities, how rainy days tend to cluster, and turns them into realistic daily rainfall and temperature sequences. Feed it a year's worth of climate parameters and it hands back a plausible day-by-day year. Nota prediction of what will happen on any specific date, but a stand-in that behaves the way the real climate does, statistically. That's what a hydrological or disease model needs to run: sequences of wet and dry days, not seasonal averages.
Rasmus Benestad describes the design in a new discussion paper, tested against rain gauge records from Norway, Ghana, and Romania. The evaluation found it closely approximates observed daily precipitation across those different climate settings, and a companion temperature generator showed reasonable skill as well. Both now live in 'esd', the free, open-access R package the team maintains, so anyone modeling a "typical" year under a changing climate can use it.
It fits a broader push within SPRINGS to make global climate projections usable at the community level. Over the past months the team finished translating big-picture projections into local numbers for two of its four case study countries: rainfall and temperature for Ghana, rainfall for Tanzania (temperature there still stays hard to pin down). Romania and Italy are next.
Read the discussion paper here.
About the project:
SPRINGS is an EU-funded project focused on addressing the impact of climate change on waterborne diarrheal diseases. Diarrheal diseases are currently the third leading cause of death in children under 5 years of age globally. Compounded by global climate projections indicating increased precipitation, flooding, and drought, there is a looming threat to the progress made in reducing diarrheal disease burden. To inform and prioritise effective political responses, SPRINGS is building 4 case studies in Italy, Ghana, Romania, and Tanzania with contrasting vulnerabilities.