A non-linear and non-stationary perspective for downscaling mean monthly temperature: a wavelet coupled second order Volterra model

This study presents a multiscale framework for downscaling of the General Circulation Model (GCM) outputs to the mean monthly temperature at regional scale using a wavelet based Second order Voltera (SoV) model. The models are developed using the reanalysis climatic data from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and are validated using the simulated climatic dataset from the Can CM4 GCM for five locations in the Krishna river basin, India. K-means clustering, based on the multiscale wavelet entropy of the predictors, is used for obtaining the clusters of the input climatic variables. Principal component analysis (PCA) is used to obtain the representative variables from each cluster. These input variables are then used to develop a wavelet based multiscale model using Second order Volterra approach to simulate observed mean monthly temperature for the selected locations in the basin. These models are called W-P-SoV models in this paper. For the purpose of comparison, linear multi-resolution models are developed using Multiple Linear regression (MLR) and are called W-P MLR models. The performance of the models is further compared with other Wavelet-PCA based models coupled with Multiple linear regression models (P-MLR) and Artificial Neural Networks (P-ANN), and, stand-alone MLR and ANN to establish the superiority of the proposed approach. The results indicate that the performance of the wavelet based models is superior in terms of downscaling accuracy when compared with the other models used.