On the search for vital details of climate change

Solutions evaluating meteorological forcings in conditions of climate change are needed in many practical applications of engineering design. While climate change projections are typically more credible at the global and regional scales, they may have significant biases at the scales of “human action”. There is a demand for advanced techniques that offer the capability of transferring predictions of climate models to fine spatial and temporal scales commensurate with practical applications and for higher order statistics. This study contributes to solutions addressing the above problem. First, we discuss the principal sources of uncertainty in transferring climate change projections to the scales at which practitioners operate. Second, we propose a way forward that involves a probabilistic framework, where a part of the total uncertainty can be accounted for in local scale projections of climate change. We conclude that such projections could be very useful in combination with vulnerability based approaches in order to identify the main criticalities of a system and supporting the design decisions.