Journal of Spatial Analysis

---

Understanding the changes in extreme precipitation over a region is very important for adaptation strategies to climate change. One of the most important topics in this field is detection and attribution of climate change. Over the past two decades, there has been an increasing interest for scientists, engineers and policy makers to study about the effects of external forcing to the climatic variables and associated natural resources and human systems and whether such effects have surpassed the influence of the climate’s natural internal variability. The definitions used in the 5th assessment report were taken from the IPCC guidance paper on detection and attribution, and were stated as follows: “Detection of change is defined as the process of demonstrating that climate or a system affected by climate has changed in some defined statistical sense without providing a reason for that change. An identified change is detected in observations if its likelihood of occurrence by chance due to internal variability alone is determined to be small.  Attribution is defined as the process of evaluating the relative contributions of multiple causal factors to a change or event with an assignment of statistical confidence”. Detection and attribution of human-induced climate change provide a formal tool to decipher the complex causes of climate change. In this study the optimal fingerprinting detection and attribution have been attempted to investigate the changes in the annual maximum of daily precipitation and the annual maximum of 5-day consecutive precipitation amount over the southwest of Iran.

This is achieved through the use of the Asian Precipitation—Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources Project(APHRODITE) dataset as observation, a climate model runs and the standard optimal fingerprint method. To evaluate the response of climate to external forcing and to estimate the internal variability of the climate system from pre-industrial runs, the Norwegian Climate Center’s Earth System Model- NorESM1-M was used. We used up scaling to remap both grid data of observations and simulations to a large pixel. This remapped pixel coverages the area of the southwest of Iran. The optimal finger printing method needs standardized values like probability index(PI) or anomalies as input data, since the magnitude of precipitation varied highly from one region to another. The General Extreme Value distribution (GEV) is used to convert time series of the Rx1day and Rx5day into corresponding time series of PI.  Then we calculated non-overlapping 5-year mean PI time series over the area study. In this research, we applied optimal fingerprinting method by using empirical orthogonal functions.  The implementation of optimal fingerprinting often involves projecting onto k leading EOFs in order to decrease the dimension of the data and improve the estimate of internal climate variability. A residual consistency test used to check if the estimated residuals in regression algorithm are consistent with the assumed internal climate variability. Indeed, as the covariance matrix of internal variability is assumed to be known in these statistical models, it is important to check whether the inferred residuals are consistent with it; such that they are a typical realization of such variability. If this test is passed, the overall statistical model can be considered suitable.

Results obtained for response to anthropogenic and natural forcing combined forcing (ALL) for Rx1day and Rx5day show that scaling factors are significantly greater than zero and consistent with unit. These results indicate that the simulated ALL response is consistent with Rx1day observed changes. Also, it is found that the changes in observed extreme precipitation during 1951-2005 lie outside the range that is expected from natural internal variability of climate alone and greenhouse gasses alone, based on NorESM1-M climate model. Such changes are consistent with those expected from anthropogenic forcing alone. The detection results are sensitive to EOFs. We estimate the anthropogenic and natural forcing combined attributable change in PI over 1951–2005 to be 1.64% [0.18%, 3.1%, >90% confidence interval] for RX1day and 2.5% [1%,4%] for RX5day.

---

 Detection and Attribution of Changing in Seasonal variability cause of climate change (Case study: Hillsides of Central Southern Alborz Mountains)
Abstract
One of the most important challenges for the human communities is Global Warming. This vital problem affected by Climate Change and corresponding effects. Thus this article attempted to assess the trend of real climate variables from synoptic stations. Daily precipitation, Daily Maximum Temperature and Daily Minimum Temperature have been selected for the Hillsides of Southern Central Alborz Mountains and have been tried to prove climate change and attribute the related forcing such as Greenhouse Gases. The Capital of Iran located in this region and this region has a special occasion, because at least a quarter of Iranian population live in these provinces (Tehran and Alborz) and four big dams located in this region. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s defines ‘‘detection’’ of climate change as ‘‘the process of demonstrating that climate or a system affected by climate has changed in some defined statistical sense, without providing a reason for that change,’’ while ‘‘attribution’’ is defined as the process of evaluating the relative contribution of multiple causal factors to a change or event with an assignment of statistical confidence. Regional D&A studies provide an insight to local changes in natural systems and may help in planning and developing robust adaptation strategies. Previously, formal detection and attribution have been used to investigate the nature of changes in various climatological variables such as air temperature, surface specific humidity, ocean heat, sea level pressure, continental river runoff, global land precipitation and precipitation extremes. However, almost all of these studies deal with climatological or meteorological variables at the global or continental scale. Studies which have attempted to formally detect and attribute regional hydrometeorological changes to anthropogenic effects are rare. Regional-scale D&A analysis is more difficult because the detection of anthropogenic ‘‘signal’’ in natural internal climate variability ‘‘noise’’ is determined by the signal-to-noise ratio which is proportional to the spatial scale of analysis, especially for real observation data. For overcoming this issue interpolation method (IDW) has been applied to transfer point data to area (gridded) data. The point data gathered from 3 synoptic stations (Mehrabad, Karaj and Abali). Then transferred data have been Standard and Averaged for 3 years. Standard values of annual and seasonal amounts have been computed for individual stations as the average of the standard values of annual and seasonal amounts available 3 years anomaly values. Estimates of annual or seasonal variables anomalies were obtained by averaging the annual or seasonal by 12 or 3 respectively. For detecting and attributing 3 simulation signals (ALL, GHG and NAT) selected from Canadian General Circulation Model (CanESM2.0) of CMIP5 archive subcategories. Space–time series of observations and model simulated variables responses to external forcings (the “signals”) first have been compared qualitatively by computing correlation coefficients between observations and simulations. This simple method does not optimize the signal-to-noise ratio nor provide a quantitative measure of the magnitude of model simulated response relative to that in the observations. Nevertheless, it provides an easy-to-understand view of the similarity between observed and model-simulated changes. Optimal detection and attribution analysis very often requires a reduction of dimensionality. This is typically done by projecting both observations and simulations onto leading empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) of internal variability and using the residual consistency check to determine the number of EOFs to be retained in the analysis. To produce internal variability for residual test and consistency, Pi-Ctrl Runs have been used. The Preindustrial simulations have high volume, this subject complicates calculation therefore Experimental Orthogonal Functions (EOFs) have been used to reduce the Pi-Ctrl simulations volume and provide situations for Optimal Fingerprint. Optimal Fingerprint method is the best method for Detection and Attribution. Results have been obtained by this manner indicated Global Warming affected the study region by affecting on mean cumulative winter precipitation (0.88), mean spring minimum temperature (0.78) and mean summer maximum temperature (0.76). These numbers are the beta coefficient that named scaling factor. Although the scaling factor for the mean spring minimum temperature affected from GHG signal obtained (0.73), but the GHG forcing alone didn’t have a significant effect on the precipitation and maximum temperature. Also, NAT signal didn’t have significant effect on the region alone, too. The obtained results of this study indicate the earlier studies, such as Wan et al, 2014.
 
Key words: Climate change, Detection, Attribution, Optimal Fingerprint, Hillsides of Central Southern Alborz Mountains