Climate Dynamics (2019) 53:4629–4649

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-019-04809-x

An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods

for daily precipitation and temperature over China: present climate
evaluations
Yi Yang1 · Jianping Tang1   · Zhe Xiong2 · Shuyu Wang1 · Jian Yuan3

Received: 4 February 2018 / Accepted: 8 May 2019 / Published online: 15 May 2019
© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract
Four statistical downscaling methods, that is, three quantile mapping based techniques including bias-correction and spatial
downscaling (BCSD), bias-correction and climate imprint (BCCI), and bias correction constructed analogues with quantile
mapping reordering (BCCAQ), and the cumulative distribution function transform (CDF-t) method, are evaluated with
daily observed precipitation and surface temperature for 1961–2005 over China. The four downscaling methods improve the
accuracy over the driving general climate models (GCMs) significantly in terms of spatial variability, bias, seasonal cycle,
and probability density functions of daily series and extreme events. Overall, BCSD outperforms other methods in frequency
distributions of daily temperature, precipitation, and extreme precipitation indices such as wet and dry spell lengths. But it
comparably has larger biases in temperature-related extremes. When downscaling the seasonal and extreme precipitation,
the three quantile mapping based techniques exhibit better capacity than CDF-t in terms of the spatial correlation and bias
over all subregions. Whereas CDF-t methods overestimate consecutive wet days and extreme wet indices significantly, as it
displays limited improvement over the driving GCMs by producing too many drizzle days using either absolute or relative
threshold. All methods are equally skillful in downscaling monthly and seasonal temperature, and the temperature extremes
are better reproduced by BCCI, BCCAQ and CDF-t. However, the statistical downscaling methods show limited capacity
in improving the interannual variability of temperature and precipitation extremes.

Keywords  Statistical downscaling · Intercomparison · China · Extreme

1 Introduction to the more frequently occurring disasters, which impose

Because of the vast territory, complex topography, and the
strong influence of East Asian monsoon, China is susceptible
to extreme weather and climate events such as floods and
droughts (Huang et al. 2007). Regional climate change under
the influence of global warming is of increasing concern due
* Jianping Tang
jptang@nju.edu.cn
1
CMA‑NJU Joint Laboratory for Climate Prediction Studies,
Institute for Climate and Global Change Research, School
of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, 163 Xianlin
Road, Nanjing, China
2 GCM over the domain of interest to provide better repre-
Key Laboratory of Regional Climate‑Environment
for Temperate East Asia, Institute of Atmospheric Physics,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
3
Institute for Climate and Global Change Research, School
of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
profound impacts on human safety and local economy.
Many studies have been conducted to simulate and project
climate changes in China based on general climate models
(GCMs) (Jiang et al. 2004; Li and Zhou 2010; Chen et al.
2011; Chong-Hai and Ying 2012; Zhou et al. 2014). Despite
continuous improvements, GCMs are restricted in their abil-
ity to provide detailed information for regional to local scale
climate impact studies (such as hydrologic modeling and
water resources assessment). To address the scale mismatch
issues, downscaling techniques of dynamical and statistical
downscalings have been developed and widely applied over
the past 2 decades (Wilby and Wigley 1997). Dynamical
downscaling nests a regional climate model (RCM) in the
sentation of physical processes consistent with large-scale
dynamics; however, it is computationally demanding and
inherits bias from GCM boundary conditions. On the other
hands, statistical downscaling is computationally efficient,

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and able to directly incorporate observations for bias correc-
tion. It can be easily applied to multiple regions and GCMs
to generate large scenario ensembles (Wilby et al. 2004;
Fowler et al. 2007), and has been widely used in climate
investigation and climate impact assessments.
Statistical downscaling approaches establish statistical
relationships relating the large-scale predictors to regional
and local predictands (Trigo and Palutikof 1999; Wilby and
Wigley 2000; Jakob Themeßl et al. 2011; Tripathi et al.
2006), and typically assume that the relationships estab-
lished under present climate remain valid under changed
future climate (stationarity assumption). There are many
categories of statistical methods. With the growing avail-
ability of climate model ensembles such as those from COR-
DEX (Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experi-
ment, Giorgi et al. 2009), model output statistics (MOS)
that directly applied to RCM or GCM outputs has become
popular (Maraun et al. 2010; Hanson et al. 2012; Hwang
and Graham 2013; Stoner et al. 2013; Gutiérrez et al. 2018).
Under the MOS approach, global and regional climate model
simulations are statistically corrected against observations,
thus accounting for systematic model biases. Previous stud-
ies show the MOS methods (sometimes called bias correc-
tion methods) are easy to implement with high skill (Sala-
thé 2003; Widmann et al. 2003; Maurer and Hidalgo 2008),
and have been widely applied in regional climate change
and adaptation studies especially over the United States and
European countries (Payne et al. 2004; Iizumi et al. 2011;
Abatzoglou and Brown 2012; Sunyer Pinya et al. 2015).
Among these approaches, bias-correction and spatial downs-
caling (BCSD, Wood et al. 2004) and constructed analogues
(CA, Hidalgo et al. 2008) are regularly used, owing to their
good performances in the hydrologic assessments. The inter-
comparison studies of statistical downscaling methods for
climate impact assessments (Maurer et al. 2010; Bürger et al.
2013; Pierce et al. 2013; Mizukami et al. 2016) demonstrate
that these methods are effective to simulate both mean cli-
mate and extreme events, with relatively better performance
for temperature-related indices.
Meanwhile, much attention has been paid to statistical
downscaling methods in China (Wetterhall et al. 2006; Chu
et al. 2010; Huang et al. 2011; Liu et al. 2011, 2012; Chen
et al. 2012; Tang et al. 2016). However, focusing on the
monthly to annual time-scales and mostly at the station
level, very few studies have been conducted to investigate
the extremes, especially over the arid and semiarid regions
of China. The BCSD method, shown to be robust over the
continental US (Wood et al. 2004), has recently been used to
obtain local meteorological variables (e.g., temperature and
evaporation) and to assess climate change impacts in China
(Fang et al. 2016; Wen et al. 2015, 2016). Wang and Chen
(2013) evaluated the performance of BCSD for downscal-
ing monthly precipitation in China, and found that BCSD
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Y. Yang et al.
is an effective tool to remove biases of models. They then
used this approach to predict future variations of tempera-
ture, precipitation and climatological drought under differ-
ent emission scenarios (Wang and Chen 2014). In addition,
the intercomparison of different approaches is relatively
scarce over China (Chu et al. 2010; Hu et al. 2013; Liu et al.
2013), and BCSD has not been fully evaluated and exam-
ined against other statistical downscaling methods. The key
elements such as dry spell length, are barely evaluated thor-
oughly, though they are important in hydrologic and agri-
cultural applications.
This paper analyzes the application of four commonly
used statistical downscaling methods, namely, BCSD, BCCI
(bias-correction and climate imprint), BCCAQ (bias cor-
rection constructed analogues with quantile mapping reor-
dering), and CDF-t (cumulative distribution function trans-
form). We assess their capabilities to reproduce the daily
surface climatology and extreme events in present climate
over China. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2
describes the datasets, statistical downscaling methods
and the metrics for evaluation. The results are presented in
Sect. 3. Concluding remarks are given in Sect. 4.
2 Data and methods
2.1 Data
The observed daily gridded precipitation, surface mean,
maximum and minimum temperature data at 0.25° spa-
tial resolution over China for the period of 1961–2005 are
obtained from the National Climate Center of China Mete-
orological Administration (CN05.1; Wu and Gao 2013) and
are used in the calibration and assessment of the downscal-
ing methods. The observation datasets are based on interpo-
lations from 2416 meteorological stations in China and have
been widely used for model assessment (Gao et al. 2013;
Bao et al. 2015).
The historical daily outputs of precipitation, surface
mean, maximum and minimum temperature data from
seven CMIP5 models developed by different institutes are
employed for downscaling based on their performance on
large-scale simulations of climate extreme indices (Sill-
mann et al. 2013). Table 1 lists the basic information on the
names, institution, and resolution for these models. Since the
focus of this study lies on the evaluation of current climate,
only the GCM outputs of historical scenario run are used in
daily surface climate downscaling. All downscaling methods
used to generate daily precipitation and temperature data are
calibrated for the 30 years of 1971–2000, and the validation
is conducted for the remaining 15 years (1961–1970 and
2001–2005).
An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods for daily precipitation and… 4631

Table 1  Descriptions of the GCM name Institution (country) Resolution (lon-

7 CMIP5 models used in this gitude × latitude)
study
CCSM4 National Center for Atmospheric Research (USA) 288 × 192
CESM1-BGC Community Earth System Model Contributors (USA) 288 × 192
CMCC-CM Centro Euro-Mediterraneo per I Cambiamenti Climatici (Italy) 480 × 240
CNRM-CM5 Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques/Centre Européen 256 × 128
de Recherche et Formation Avancée en Calcul Scientifique
(France)
EC-EARTH EC-Earth consortium (Europe) 320 × 160
MIROC5 Atmosphere and Ocean Research Institute (The University of 256 × 128
Tokyo), National Institute for Environmental Studies, and Japan
Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (Japan)
MRI-CGCM3 Meteorological Research Institute (Japan) 320 × 160

2.2 Statistical downscaling methods
All downscaling methods in this study use the same cli-
mate variables for the coarse- and fine- resolution fields,
and belong to the MOS approach. These methods are imple-
mented for each month separately. Table 2 gives some infor-
mation about the structural properties of the methods.
means. Daily data can be obtained by randomly resampling a
month from the historical record (1971–2000), and rescaling
the observed daily values to match the downscaled monthly
values. Following Maurer and Hidalgo (2008), this temporal
disaggregation is constrained by a check on precipitation
scaling factor (no more than three) and number of wet days
to avoid unrealistic precipitation values.

2.2.1 Bias‑correction and spatial downscaling (BCSD) 2.2.2 Bias‑correction and climate imprint (BCCI)

The BCSD approach developed by Wood et al. (2002, 2004)
has been widely used to downscale GCM simulations for
impact assessments. This two-step method first corrects the
biases in monthly GCM outputs against gridded observations
aggregated to the coarse model resolution using detrended
quantile mapping (DQM) with the delta method extrapola-
tion (Werner 2011; Bürger et al. 2013). Second, the bias-
corrected monthly GCM fields are spatially disaggregated to
the fine-scale grid using high-resolution monthly anomalies.
The anomalies are calculated as the ratio (for precipitation)
or difference (for temperature) between large-scale bias-
corrected GCM values and coarse-scale observed monthly
The BCCI method, described in detail by Hunter and
Meentemeyer (2005), is a statistical technique using monthly
observed climatologies at the fine scale to represent envi-
ronmental gradients. Daily anomalies of GCM outputs rela-
tive to the coarse-scale model monthly climatology over the
calibration period are calculated and then interpolated to
the high-resolution observational grid. These interpolated
daily anomalies are multiplied (for precipitation) or added
(for temperature) to the fine-scale observational climatol-
ogy for each month to generate the daily fine-scale data.
Finally, BCCI applies bias-correction as a post-processing
step by the same quantile mapping as in BCSD but for daily

Table 2  The downscaling methods used in this study

Method TS BCA Characteristic CCDF

BCSD Monthly DQM Perform bias correction at the large scale No

Spatial disaggregation
Temporal disaggregation
BCCI Daily DQM Interpolate the raw model output to fine resolution with the CI delta method No
Perform bias correction at the fine scale
BCCAQ Daily DQM Daily BCCI outputs at each fine-scale grid point are reordered within a given month No
according to the daily BCCA ranks
CDF-t Daily CDF-t Perform a bilinear interpolation of raw model output to fine resolution Yes
CDF transformation between the future large- and local-scale CDFs

All methods are used to generate daily data. TS indicates the time scale the methods applied to. BCA indicates the bias correction approach used
in each method. CCDF indicates whether the methods account for changes in the large-scale CDF in the future. All methods directly downscale
temperature from the large-scale models, except BCSD, which indirectly derives minimum and maximum temperature from mean temperature

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4632
series within each month. This method preserves the daily
sequence of GCM variability but suffers from poor spatial
covariability due to the smooth interpolation from coarse to
fine resolution (Sobie and Murdock 2017).
2.2.3 Bias correction constructed analogues with quantile
mapping reordering (BCCAQ)
BCCAQ (Werner and Cannon 2016) is a hybrid downscaling
method incorporating results from BCCI and bias correc-
tion constructed analogs (BCCA; Maurer et al. 2010) by
reordering the daily BCCI outputs at each grid cell within a
given month based on the BCCA ranks. BCCA uses similar
quantile mapping step as BCSD to bias correct the daily
coarse-scale GCM outputs, and obtains spatial informa-
tion from a linear combination of historical coarse-reso-
lution observations that best match the large-scale GCM
temperature/precipitation pattern on a given day (Hidalgo
et al. 2008). BCCA has the advantage of capturing the topo-
graphic effects that are not depicted by interpolation based
methods, however, it tends to produce too much low-level
precipitation (drizzle) and underestimate the large precipi-
tation events when downscaling precipitation (Abatzoglou
and Brown 2012; Sobie and Murdock 2017). The BCCAQ
method, which combines BCCI and BCCA, retains the
advantages of each method and produces more accurate
downscaled values than the component methods (Werner
and Cannon 2016).
2.2.4 Cumulative distribution function transform (CDF‑t)
The CDF-t method, originally developed by Michelangeli
et al. (2009) for wind downscaling and recently applied
to downscale temperature and precipitation (Vigaud et al.
2013), is similar to quantile mapping but takes into account
the change in the large-scale CDF (cumulative distribution
function) from the calibration to the future (or validation)
period. This method is applied to the GCMs bilinearly inter-
polated to the fine-scale grid. A mathematical transformation
is determined to transform the CDF of large-scale predic-
tors (i.e., GCM outputs) as close as possible to the CDF
representing local-scale predictands (i.e., observations) at
each grid point during the calibration period, and the same
transformation is applied to the model projections.
Although CDF-t is directly applied to temperature, two
different processings following Lavaysse et al. (2012) are
used for precipitation as it is highly discontinuous. Both
absolute and relative thresholds are applied to define rainy
days. In the first processing (hereafter CDF-t1), only the
non-zero precipitation data in both model and observations
are supplied so as to downscale the CDF of strictly posi-
tive rainfall. A relative threshold for rainy days is used for
GCM at each grid point in the second processing (henceforth
13
Y. Yang et al.
CDF-t2), while the non-zero values are retained for the
observations. The relative threshold is determined such
that the frequency of large-scale precipitation occurrences
matches the observed local-scale one.
2.3 Evaluation metrics
The assessment of the statistical downscaling methods
is performed against the observations over the period of
1961–2005, setting the validation period of 1961–1970
and 2001–2005. The results over the calibration period of
1971–2000 are briefly discussed as well. The skill of sta-
tistical methods in downscaling the monthly temperature
and precipitation from GCMs is examined by presenting
the root-mean-square error (RMSE), mean absolute error
(MAE), and correlation coefficient (CORR) at each grid cell
over China. Besides the grid-to-grid evaluation, six subre-
gions are selected to better understand the performance of
downscaling methods on regional scales (Fig. 1). Taylor
diagram (Taylor 2001) for both boreal summer (June, July
and August) and winter (December, January and February)
is produced for seasonal skill assessment.
On a daily basis, the degree of fit on the distributions
of precipitation and temperature is qualitatively examined
in different subregions using quantile–quantile (Q–Q) plot
(Wilk and Gnanadesikan 1968), a graphical technique for
comparing the distribution of downscaled data against that
of the observations at each quantile. In addition, raw GCM
outputs bilinearly interpolated to the observational grid
are plotted as a reference to evaluate the value added from
downscaling. Nine indices recommended by the ETCCDI
(Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices) are
adopted to represent precipitation and temperature extremes
in this study (Sillmann et al. 2013). These indices derived
from downscaled daily temperature and precipitation data
are calculated per grid cell for each year by the R software
package “climdex.pcic”. Definitions of these indices are
summarized in Table 3 and more details are available at the
ETCCDI website (http://etccd​i.pacif​i ccli​mate.org/list_27_
indic​es.shtml​). The significance score (­ Sscore) (Perkins et al.
2007) is used to evaluate the consistency between the down-
scaled and observed probability density functions (PDFs)
of extreme indices. The ideal value is 1 for S ­ score, indicating
an unbiased simulation where the PDF generated by down-
scaled data is exactly the same as the observed conditions.
m
∑
Sscore = Minimum (Pdi , Poi ),
i=1
where m is the number of bins, and Pdi and Poi are the
downscaled and observed probability values at certain bin,
respectively.
An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods for daily precipitation and…
Fig. 1  Spatial distributions of root-mean-square error (RMSE), mean
absolute error (MAE), and correlation coefficient (CORR) between
the downscaled monthly precipitation (BCSD, BCCI, BCCAQ, CDF-
t1, and CDF-t2) and observations during the validation period. Boxes
It should be noted that outputs from each of the seven
GCMs are downscaled by the four downscaling methods
in both the calibration and validation periods. Because
this paper focuses on the evaluation and comparison of
downscaling methods in the present climate, multimodel
4633
in a illustrate the six subregions in China (NEC Northeast China, NC
North China, YR Yangtze River basin, SC South China, NWC North-
west China, SWC Southwest China)
ensemble is built for each method through the arithmetic
mean in this study. Preliminary analyses with individual
models did not show significant differences in the results
presented later (not shown).
13

4634 Y. Yang et al.

Table 3  Definitions of the climate extreme indices

Index Definitions Units

Precipitation indices CDD Consecutive dry days: maximum number of consecutive days with RR (daily precipitation) < 1 mm days
CWD Consecutive wet days: maximum number of consecutive days with RR ≥ 1 mm days
R10mm Number of heavy precipitation days: annual number of days when RR ≥ 10 mm days
Rx5day Maximum 5-day precipitation amount: annual maximum consecutive 5-day precipitation mm
R95p Very wet day precipitation: annual total precipitation when RR > 95th percentile of precipitation mm
Temperature indices GSL Growing season length: annual number of days between the first occurrence of 6 consecutive days with days
mean temperature > 5 °C and the first occurrence of 6 consecutive days with mean temperature < 5 °C
SU Summer days: number of days with daily maximum temperature above 25 °C days
FD Frost days: number of days with daily minimum temperature below 0 °C days
DTR Diurnal temperature range: annual mean difference between daily maximum and minimum temperature °C

3 Results
3.1 Precipitation
3.1.1 Monthly and seasonal skill
Figure 1 shows the spatial distributions of RMSE, MAE and
correlation of downscaled monthly averaged precipitation
against the observations for the validation period over China.
The RMSE and MAE for all downscaling methods show a
similar decreasing pattern from southeast to northwest of
China. Compared with the other three approaches, the two
CDF-t methods generally show larger RMSE values over the
entire China. The bias of downscaled precipitation quantified
by the MAE is higher over southeastern China than over the
arid and semi-arid areas of Northwest China, with a rela-
tively small bias of about 1.8 mm/day versus 0.2 mm/day
for the methods using quantile mapping for bias correction
(BCSD, BCCI and BCCAQ). Both CDF-t methods yield a
much larger MAE value, which is notable mainly along the
southeast coast and over the Yangtze River basin with MAE
up to 2.6 mm/day. All downscaling methods are generally
comparable and present correlation coefficients above 0.6
over almost the whole domain.
The seasonal cycles of precipitation over six subregions
and China based on various downscaled data are demon-
strated in Fig. 2. For China as a whole, BCSD, BCCI and
BCCAQ can perfectly portray the unimodal characteristics
of seasonal cycle of the domain-averaged precipitation,
whereas both CDF-t methods tend to overestimate precipi-
tation amounts by 0.1–0.8 mm/day for all months, which
is consistent with the driving GCMs, although these two
methods can reproduce the peak that occurs in July (Fig. 2g).
Similar conclusions could be drawn at different subregions.
Over Yangtze River basin, the GCMs tend to show wet
biases from January to May and dry biases from July to
October, indicating an early onset of monsoon compared to
observations, and this bias in the timing and magnitude of
the East Asian summer monsoon has been partly corrected
by the downscaling approaches (Fig. 2c). Over South China,
all downscaling methods can reproduce the bimodal curve
of precipitation with peaks in June and August, and reduce
the dry bias of models in the highest peak (Fig. 2d). The
CDF-t methods consistently overestimate the amplitude of
the seasonal cycle, even larger than that of the GCMs in
some cases. This overestimation of precipitation intensity by
CDF-t has also been reported by Gutiérrez et al. (2018) for
Europe. Generally, these downscaling methods contribute to
the satisfactory precision in reproducing seasonal cycle of
precipitation over different subregions of China.
As is well reflected in the Taylor diagram (Fig. 3), for
both calibration and validation periods, downscaling meth-
ods are more consistent with the observed precipitation
pattern than the driving models. The three quantile map-
ping based methods reproduce satisfactorily the summer
and winter spatial distributions, and are located closer to
the observations [represented by the reference point (REF)]
than CDF-t, with lower RMSE values and spatial correla-
tions above 0.95 in most cases. The downscaled standard
deviation is close to observations. The results are very simi-
lar whatever the period considered, with slightly better per-
formance of downscaling, as expected, during calibration
period. Comparing statistics calculated by the two CDF-t
processings, they perform similarly with the CDF-t1 hav-
ing slightly higher correlation and lower RMSE, implying
better performance of absolute threshold processing applied
in CDF-t1 to produce realistic precipitation patterns. How-
ever, both CDF-t methods tend to overestimate the spatial
variability of seasonal precipitation, particularly in winter,
although they clearly improve the spatial correlation of pre-
cipitation distributions compared to the raw GCMs.
3.1.2 Daily skill
The daily precipitation amounts of the raw and downscaled
GCM data are compared to observations for different

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An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods for daily precipitation and… 4635

Fig. 2  Seasonal cycles of
precipitation over different
subregions and China during
validation period. The shaded
area indicates the standard
deviation of observation on the
basis of data for 15 years

Fig. 3  Taylor diagram of sea-

sonal mean precipitation for the
driving GCMs and downscaling
methods over China. The radial
distance represents the ratio of
simulated and observed stand-
ard deviation and the angle in
the polar plot stands for spatial
correlation

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4636
subregions by Q–Q plot as shown in Fig. 4. Generally,
all downscaling methods improve the frequency dis-
tributions over the raw climate models by reducing the
underestimation of upper quantiles of daily precipitation,
which is noticeable over areas such as South China and
Yangtze River basin, and correcting the drizzle effect to
some extent over China. Directly rescaling monthly coarse
model precipitation, the BCSD significantly outperforms
other methods at all percentiles and exhibits good agree-
ment with observations, except for high extreme values,
which is consistent with the conclusions from Bürger
et al. (2012) and Eum et al. (2017). Two CDF-t methods
Fig. 4  The Q–Q plots for the spatially averaged daily precipitation of original and downscaled GCMs (y axis) with respect to observations (x
axis) during validation period
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Y. Yang et al.
produce similar distributions of daily precipitation, and
show better performances for rain rates at high intensities
than BCCI and BCCAQ. However, both methods have too
many drizzle days and show no clear improvement over
the driving fields, which could be partially responsible
for the wet biases at monthly and longer time scales. Both
BCCI and BCCAQ well reproduce the lower tail of the dis-
tribution but producing fewer high rainfall events against
observed heavy precipitation, with a slightly superior per-
formance for BCCAQ, partly owing to the combination of
BCCA and BCCI.
An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods for daily precipitation and… 4637

3.1.3 Extreme precipitation
Five precipitation extreme indices (i.e., CDD, CWD,
R10mm, Rx5day, and R95p) based on daily precipitation
data are used to assess the ability of downscaling meth-
ods for simulating the intensity, frequency and duration of
precipitation events. Figure 5 displays the spatial distribu-
tions of annual mean extreme precipitation indices over
China. Spatial statistics are reported in Fig. 6, where the
downscaled values are compared to those of observations.
Overall, all downscaling methods present a spatial pattern
close to what is observed for all extreme indices, with high
correlations in most cases. For CDD, methods employing
quantile mapping perform well. They show high correla-
tions and biases close to zero over all subregions. The two
CDF-t approaches show relatively high underestimation
over entire China, in particular over Northwest China with
bias up to − 28% for CDF-t1 and − 24% for CDF-t2, indicat-
ing shorter dry spell lengths for these methods. Although
both CDF-t can reasonably reproduce large centers of CDD
over northwestern regions, they, consistent with the driving
GCMs, fail to capture the main spatial characteristics over
South China with low spatial correlations. For the wet spell
length represented by CWD, BCSD is relatively unbiased
and presents spatial correlations above 0.8. All the other
methods, especially two CDF-t processings, are positively
biased over each subregion, indicating that these methods
produce little rainfall amount too often, which can also be
found in the results of Q–Q plot (Fig. 4). Although both
CDF-t approaches replicate the observed large CWD cent-
ers over the Sichuan Basin (28°N–32°N, 100°E–105°E) and
the southern part of the Tibetan Plateau, they are biased
high (84–93%) over the southeastern domain and, to a lesser
extent, in Southwest China (8–24%). The shorter dry spell
length along with longer wet spell length for both CDF-t
methods with respect to observations confirms the limited
improvement of CDF transform technique in correcting the
drizzle effect over the driving GCMs.

Fig. 5  Spatial distributions of the extreme precipitation indices produced by the observations and downscaling methods during validation period.
From left to right column, indices of CDD, CWD, R10mm, Rx5day, and R95p are shown, respectively

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Fig. 6  Spatial correlations and relative errors (units: %) of downscaled extreme climate indices at each subregion. Numbers inside the shaded
boxes indicate the corresponding values
For the indices of R10mm, Rx5day, and R95p, they show
a similar spatial distribution as the seasonal precipitation in
both observations and downscaled GCMs, with highest val-
ues over southeastern China and decreasing northwestward.
BCSD, BCCI, and BCCAQ generally generate more reliable
spatial distributions of these extreme precipitation indices
in China and six subregions with higher spatial correlations
and closer magnitude, although slight overestimation exists
over most areas (Fig. 6). The two CDF-t approaches present
the highest degree of overestimation among all methods in
both periods, especially for R95p with RE above 68.4% over
Northwest China, which is in agreement with their overesti-
mation of monthly and seasonal precipitation and consistent
13
Y. Yang et al.
with previous studies in Europe (Gutiérrez et al. 2018; Her-
tig et al. 2018). Overall, BCSD is closest to observed spa-
tial pattern of extreme precipitation indices except for R95p
among all downscaling methods in terms of correlation and
RE, possibly due to the resampling of historical records and
thus obtaining realistic pattern of spatial variability and the
best performance in the distribution of daily sequences.
The observed and downscaled PDFs for extreme precipi-
tation indices are illustrated in Fig. 7. Substantial improve-
ment for downscaled data compared to large-scale outputs
is detected for most indices, especially for wet and dry
spell lengths, by increasing the S ­ score of CWD from 0.79
to exceeding 0.9 for the quantile mapping based methods.
An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods for daily precipitation and… 4639

Fig. 7  PDFs of extreme precipitation indices generated from observations, driving GCMs, and downscaling methods over China in the valida-
tion period. The PDF-based statistic ­Sscore with a perfect value of 1 is calculated for each dataset

In general, all downscaling methods present reasonable
PDFs of extreme precipitation indices compared to those
derived from observations, although there exists a slight
horizontal shift in the PDF spectrums and the magnitudes
of peak values are slightly biased. The PDFs generated by
BCSD, BCCI and BCCAQ are typically quite tightly clus-
tered around the observed ones for the five indices, with
skill scores above 0.8, whereas both CDF-t methods yield
relatively lower S­ score for all indices and overestimate the
probability of longer wet spell length and upper tails of
R10mm and Rx5day, suggesting overestimation for extreme
precipitation events.
3.2 Temperature
3.2.1 Monthly and seasonal skill
Seasonal cycles of surface temperature during the valida-
tion period are shown in Fig. 8. All downscaling meth-
ods can accurately reproduce the seasonal cycle in the

13

4640
Fig. 8  The same as Fig. 2, but
for surface temperature
domain-averaged surface temperature at each subregion
with dry or more humid conditions, and present an obvi-
ous improvement over the driving GCMs with a decreasing
RMSE from 1.36 to 0.24 °C over China as a whole.
Figure 9 shows the biases of downscaled seasonal sur-
face temperature over China in the validation period. The
associated metrics (bias, RMSE, and spatial correlations)
are shown in Fig. 10. All four downscaling methods pro-
duce similar results for both JJA and DJF. In summer, all
methods present a slight cold bias around − 0.3 °C over
most areas, whereas for winter season they show a marked
warm bias over Northeast China (regional bias of approxi-
mately 1 °C), Inner Mongolia, and the northern part of
13
Y. Yang et al.
Xinjiang province, and a slight cold bias (− 0.1 °C) over
Qinghai province, Sichuan Basin, and the south edge of
China. The interannual variations in RMSE and spatial
correlation are more or less the same for all downscaling
methods, with high spatial correlation coefficients (greater
than 0.98) and relatively small RMSE values (about 0.5 °C
in JJA and 1.1 °C in DJF), indicating a good performance
of statistical downscaling methods in reproducing the vari-
ability of seasonal mean temperature. The relatively high
RMSE values in the years such as 1967 and 1976 may be
related to the extreme cold winters in these years (Zheng
et  al. 2012). Overall, there is little difference between
methods for monthly and seasonal temperature.
An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods for daily precipitation and…
Fig. 9  Biases (°C) in seasonal
surface air temperature by four
downscaling methods of BCSD,
BCCI, BCCAQ, and CDF-t for
the validation period
3.2.2 Daily skill
To analyze the fit of the downscaled distributions to the
observed ones, the Q–Q plot for daily surface mean tem-
perature at different subregions is shown in Fig. 11. Gener-
ally, GCMs tend to overestimate the lower end of extreme
values and underestimate the upper tails over North China
and Yangtze River basin, whereas underestimation at all
quantiles is detected over Southwest China. The downscal-
ing methods vastly improve the frequency distribution by
reducing the biases of GCM simulated percentiles over the
whole China, especially over Southwest China. Overall, all
downscaling methods can well replicate the statistical distri-
bution of the observed daily temperature and the extremes.
4641
Systematic warm biases are generated at the lower quantiles
of surface temperature by BCCI, BCCAQ and CDF-t, with
little discrepancy among the different results. Similar con-
clusions can be drawn for the daily maximum and minimum
temperatures (not shown).
3.2.3 Extreme temperature
Figure 12 displays spatial patterns of extreme temperature
indices during the validation period for observations, driv-
ing GCMs and the four statistical downscaling methods. In
general, all downscaling methods well capture the spatial
characteristics of observed extreme temperature indices,
with correlation coefficients up to 0.99. The improvement
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4642
Fig. 10  The first column dem-
onstrates the bar plots of bias
(°C) for downscaled seasonal
mean temperature at each subre-
gion in a summer and b winter
during the validation period.
The second column is the inter-
annual variation in RMSE (°C)
(scatters) and spatial correla-
tion coefficients (line) between
downscaled c summer and d
winter temperature and observa-
tions over China
over GCMs is substantial, as four methods display more
skills in reproducing both the spatial distributions and mag-
nitudes of extreme events. The growing season length (GSL)
is slightly underestimated by all methods over most areas,
whereas BCSD presents relatively high overestimation of
about 15 days along Yangtze River. The biases range from
− 12 to 4 days for summer days (SU) with distinctive spatial
characteristic, that is, underestimation in most of eastern
and northern China, while overestimation of about 4 days
over Northeast China. For frost days (FD), the magnitudes
of differences between the downscaled and observed values
are really small (within ± 4 days) for all methods, except
for BCSD, which produces large underestimation up to
− 10 days over the northern part of Yangtze River basin,
consistent with the warm bias in the lower tails of daily
minimum temperature. For DTR, all methods present slight
underestimation with a regional bias of around − 0.55 °C for
BCSD and − 0.27 °C for the other three methods.
The PDFs for extreme temperature indices during the
validation period are shown in Fig. 13. It is evident that
GCMs display shift toward either the lower or higher ends
of spectrums. Such biases are generally corrected by the
application of statistical downscaling methods. Overall,
all downscaling methods reproduce the PDF of observed
extreme temperature indices, and generate a skill score in
excess of 0.76 for GSL and 0.9 for SU, FD and DTR. The
spectrum of diurnal temperature range is shifted towards low
values by all methods especially BCSD, implying smaller
range of diurnal temperature. Comparably, BCCI, BCCAQ
and CDF-t perform slightly better than BCSD for DTR as
far as the commonly used ­Sscore is concerned.
13
Y. Yang et al.
Figure 14 presents the time series of extreme indices
spatially averaged over China. As expected, downscaling
methods are (obviously) more reliable in reproducing the
magnitudes and ranges of the interannual variability of
extreme temperature indices compared to GCMs, as down-
scaling approach presents more reasonable regional aver-
ages of extreme indices. However, downscaling certainly
can not reproduce the observed year-to-year variances of
the extremes, as they are strongly influenced by the skill
of driving GCMs and therefore because the bias-correction
methods using CDF mapping do not explicitly change the
temporal pattern or timing of temperature events (Hwang
and Graham 2013). The standard deviation of annual mean
values is adopted as a measure of interannual variability
of extreme indices. Compared to observations, the GCMs
tend to underestimate interannual variability of temperature
extremes, especially for FD and DTR (Fig. 14, right panel).
This performance is generally unchanged by the downscal-
ing methods. An exception is the BCSD for DTR (Fig. 14h),
which shows a much smaller spread across models than the
raw GCMs and other methods, and the spatial averages
are broadly uniform over time (Fig. 14d). Note that BCSD
indirectly derives minimum and maximum temperature
from mean temperature by assuming a fixed climatological
diurnal temperature range (Bürger et al. 2012; Werner and
Cannon 2016), thus this method is not suitable to model
the possible changes in DTR. Similar results are found for
precipitation extremes: downscaling methods add substantial
value by simulating more reliable regional averages, even
for the spell-length-related extremes, while generally retain-
ing the interannual correlation of the driving models (not
An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods for daily precipitation and…
Fig. 11  The same as Fig. 4, but for the daily surface temperature
shown). However, in contrast to temperature, downscaling
methods especially BCSD can modify the interannual vari-
ability of precipitation extremes, in particular for the dry and
wet spells. Such improvement of the MOS methods in tem-
poral variability may be indirectly achieved via modification
of the marginal distribution (Gutmann et al. 2014; Maraun
et al. 2017).
4 Summary and conclusions
In this study, four widely used statistical downscaling meth-
ods, BCSD, BCCI, BCCAQ and CDF-t, are evaluated via a
comparison with gridded observations over China for the
present climate (1961–2005), as applied to seven GCMs
from CMIP5. The skill of each downscaling method is
evaluated based on the ensemble mean of the seven down-
scaled models in terms of climatology, temporal variability
4643
and extreme events. The comparison is conducted for daily,
monthly and seasonal data across spatial scales ranging from
six subregions to the whole domain. The historical record
is divided into two parts, a calibration period of 1971–2000
and the remaining period for independent validation.
The quantile mapping based methods (i.e., BCSD, BCCI
and BCCAQ) can accurately reproduce the spatial patterns
and magnitudes of seasonal precipitation and exhibit compa-
rable skills at all subregions with different climate character-
istics. However, the two CDF-t processings tend to overesti-
mate the observed precipitation regardless of the season over
the whole domain. Considering spatial structure, BCSD,
BCCI and BCCAQ present excellent capacity to downscale
precipitation from large-scale fields over China, whereas
the CDF-t methods present poor performance as compared
to other methods with relatively low spatial correlations.
This is expected since the CDF-t approach applied at each
individual grid point is not designed to improve the spatial
13

4644
Fig. 12  The distributions of extreme temperature indices from observations (the top panel) for the validation period and bias for the raw and
downscaled GCMs (from second to bottom panel)
variability of initial driving fields (Vrac et al. 2012; Flaounas
et al. 2013). In terms of seasonal cycles of precipitation, all
downscaling methods present substantial improvements over
the driving GCMs in China, especially over Yangtze River
basin, where the biases in both magnitude and the begin-
ning of monsoon system are generally corrected, though the
two CDF-t methods overestimate precipitation throughout
the year. As expected, performance is better for temperature
than precipitation at both monthly and seasonal time scales,
13
Y. Yang et al.
and little difference is found among the four downscaling
methods.
At the daily time scale, all downscaling methods gener-
ally display obvious advantages over the driving GCMs in
simulating the frequency distribution of daily precipitation.
The BCSD method shows the highest skill in producing the
distribution of observed daily sequences and extremes, and
effectively corrects the drizzle effect of GCMs. This may be
attributed to its random sampling of historical months when
An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods for daily precipitation and…
Fig. 13  The same as Fig. 7, but for the extreme temperature indices
temporally disaggregating to a daily time scale, however, the
temporal disaggregation in BCSD may lead to discontinu-
ity between months. In contrast, although the two CDF-t
approaches produce some high rainfall events matching
observed heavy precipitation, they still overestimate the
probability of light rainfall as observed in the driving GCMs,
which may be responsible for the shorter dry spell length
and longer wet spell length generated by these methods. All
downscaling methods can capture well the spatial features
of precipitation extremes and exhibit high spatial correla-
tions with observations, although the bias of extreme indices
focusing on frequency and intensity (R10mm, Rx5day, and
R95p) is relatively larger compared to the indices related to
persistence (CDD and CWD). BCSD, BCCI and BCCAQ
outperform CDF-t for all extreme precipitation indices with
smaller bias and higher correlations. And the two CDF-t
processings for precipitation do not appear to differ greatly
based on all performance metrics.
The skill in downscaling daily temperature is better as
compared to that for precipitation, and the discrepancy
among the four downscaling methods is not evident. The
satisfactory performance of CDF-t to downscale temperature
may be partially attributed to the better skill of GCMs in
4645
simulating large-scale temperature than precipitation, which
makes the correction by CDF transform easier. The Q–Q plot
reveals that, BCSD demonstrates a superior ability in repro-
ducing the frequency distribution of surface mean tempera-
ture, whereas the other methods tend to slightly overestimate
the lower tails of the quantiles, indicating a warm bias in the
extreme cold temperature. All methods can accurately cap-
ture the main spatial characteristics of extreme temperature
indices and reduce biases in the driving GCMs. Although
BCSD is generally unbiased for precipitation extremes, the
bias in BCSD-downscaled temperature extremes is slightly
higher than the other three methods, which may be due to the
fact that minimum and maximum temperature are indirectly
downscaled, and the effect of this implementation is most
clear for DTR. The overall shape of the observed PDFs for
temperature extremes is well replicated, although the spec-
trum of DTR is shifted towards lower ends by all methods
especially BCSD, which is in consensus with the relatively
high underestimation of diurnal temperature range for
BCSD, possibly due to the assumption of a uniform DTR in
this method (Bürger et al. 2012). Regarding interannual vari-
ability, consistent with previous studies (Hwang and Graham
2013; Flaounas et al. 2013; Maraun et al. 2017), none of
13

4646
Fig. 14  a–d Time series of temperature indices from 1961 to 2005
of the observations (black), GCM results (dashed) and downscal-
ing methods (BCSD: blue, BCCI: red, BCCAQ: green, and CDF-t:
orange). e–h Bias of the individual methods in interannual variability
represented as the ratio of simulated and observed standard deviation
these methods brings a gain over the driving GCMs in terms
of temporal correlation, although the improvement in terms
of magnitude is clear for both extreme temperature and
13
Y. Yang et al.
calculated over 1961–2005. For each method, boxes denote the 25th
and 75th percentiles of model spread with the horizontal line indicat-
ing the median and whiskers representing the maximum values within
1.5 times the interquartile range, values outside that range are plotted
individually
precipitation indices. For temperature, interannual standard
deviation is generally inherited from the driving models, but
for precipitation, downscaling especially BCSD can improve
An intercomparison of multiple statistical downscaling methods for daily precipitation and…
the interannual variances of dry and wet spells, which are
generally underestimated and overestimated by the GCMs,
respectively. This can be partly explained by a side effect
of adjusting the marginal distribution by the downscaling.
This study investigates the performance of statistical
downscaling methods that directly use GCM daily precipi-
tation and temperature as predictors for the corresponding
fine-scale fields, and provides water resource managers
with information on the fidelity of different downscaling
methods over China. The methods used in this study can
also be applied to RCM outputs. All downscaling methods
exhibit good stabilities and generate results with little skill
distinction between the calibration and validation periods.
However, a common limitation of statistical downscaling
is the stationarity assumption (Fowler et al. 2007), which
is difficult to verify, and only a few studies have focused on
this problem (Vrac et al. 2007; Hertig and Jacobeit, 2013;
Dixon et al. 2016). The CDF-t method seems to be very
promising due to its consideration of change in large-scale
fields, in spite of its wet bias for precipitation, which has
also been indicated in other studies (Gutiérrez et al. 2018;
Hertig et al. 2018). Although the good skill of downscal-
ing methods in reproducing accurate present climate and
extreme events do not guarantee a good representation of
altered climate conditions, a natural follow-up of this study
is to apply downscaling methods to future scenarios for cli-
mate change impact studies and perform consistent future
intercomparison studies over China.
Acknowledgements  The work is jointly funded by the National Key
Research and Development Program of China (2018YFA0606003 and
2016YFC0202000: Task 2) and the National Natural Science Founda-
tion of China (41875124, 91425304, 41575099 and 41275004). This
work is also supported by the Chinese Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation
Center for Climate Change. The authors would like to thank National
Climate Center of China Meteorological Administration for the pro-
vision of high-resolution gridded observations (CN05.1), the World
Climate Research Programme (https:​ //esgf-node.llnl.gov/search​ /cmip5​
/) for providing the CMIP5 data, and Michelangeli et al. (2009) for
developing and making available the R-package “CDFt”. The statistical
downscaling in this paper has been performed on the computing facili-
ties in the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) of Nanjing
University.
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