Bias correction (BC) has become indispensable to climate model output as a post-processing step to render output more useful for impact assessment studies. The current work presents a comparison of different state-of-the-art BC methods (univariate and multivariate) and BC approaches (direct and component-wise) for climate model simulations from three initiatives (CMIP6, CORDEX, and CORDEX-CORE) for a multivariate drought index (i.e., standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index).

Deep neural networks are used to produce downscaled regional climate change projections over Europe for temperature and precipitation for the first time. The resulting dataset, DeepESD, is analyzed against state-of-the-art downscaling methodologies, reproducing more accurately the observed climate in the historical period and showing plausible future climate change signals with low computational requirements.

Now that global climate models (GCMs) can run at similar resolutions to regional climate models (RCMs), one may wonder whether GCMs and RCMs provide similar regional climate information. We perform an evaluation for daily precipitation distribution in PRIMAVERA GCMs (25–50 km resolution) and CORDEX RCMs (12–50 km resolution) over Europe. We show that PRIMAVERA and CORDEX simulate similar distributions. Considering both datasets at such a resolution results in large benefits for impact studies.

We introduce downscaleR, an open-source tool for statistical downscaling (SD) of climate information, implementing the most popular approaches and state-of-the-art techniques. It makes possible the development of end-to-end downscaling applications, from data retrieval to model building, validation, and prediction, bringing to climate scientists and practitioners a unique comprehensive framework for the development of complex and fully reproducible SD experiments.

Given the large number of available data sets and products currently produced for climate impact studies, it is challenging to distil the most accurate and useful information for climate services. This work presents a comparison of methods widely used to generate climate projections, from different sources and at different spatial resolutions, in order to assess the role of downscaling and statistical post-processing (bias correction).