Author: Sarah El Outayek

Publisher:

Published: 2021

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

"Information on the variations of rainfall in space and time is essential for the design and management of different water resources systems. This thesis proposed a new stochastic model (referred herein as the MCME model) that is able to capture accurately the statistical properties of the observed daily precipitation process for the current and future climates under different climate change scenarios. The MCME model consists of two components: (i) the first component representing the daily precipitation occurrence process based on the first-order two-state Markov Chain (MC); and (ii) the second component describing the distribution of daily precipitation amounts using the Mixed Exponential (ME) distribution. A comparative study was carried out to assess the performance of the proposed model as compared to the popular LARS-WG model using observed daily precipitation data from a network of nine raingauges representing different climatic conditions across Quebec. Results of this study have indicated the better performance of the MCME model in terms of its accuracy and robustness in the modeling of the daily precipitation process. In addition, an improved perturbation method was developed for establishing the linkages between the proposed MCME model with the coarse-scale climate model outputs. Results of a comparative study using both MCME and LARS-WG models have demonstrated the best performance of the proposed perturbation method as compared with other existing perturbation methods in terms of its accuracy in capturing different statistical properties of the projected daily precipitation process for future periods. Finally, an assessment of the performance of the MCME and LARS-WG models based on the proposed perturbation technique was performed in the context of climate change using daily precipitation data from a network of five stations located in Quebec and Ontario and the downscaled simulation data from 21 different global climate models. Results of this assessment have indicated the feasibility and accuracy of the proposed MCME model and the proposed perturbation technique for downscaling daily precipitation processes for impact and adaptation studies in practice"--