Evaluating the performance of artificial intelligence models for temperature downscaling (Study area: Ardabil province)

Long and short term weather forecasting have been as two of the most important challenges to water and climate researchers. In order to overcome this challenge, several tools, including atmospheric-ocean general circulation model forecasting scenarios, and downscaling models have been developed and used. These tools downscale forecasting scenarios by creating relationship between parameters of synoptic stations and Large-scale data of general circulation models.

In this study large-scale predictor parameters from 1961 to 2003 from the database of National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), large-scale data for the A1B and A2 forecast scenarios of the HadCM3 model from 2001 to 2100 from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis (CCCMA), and the meteorological synoptic data of Ardabil stations from the Meteorological Organization were gathered. To this end, three downscaling models such as Statistical Downscaling Model (SDSM), least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) were determined for downscaling; and correlation coefficient (CC), Mean Squared Error (MSE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Normalized mean square error (NMSE), Nash-Sutcliffe, Mean Absolute Error (MAE), and Taylor diagram were used to evaluate the efficiency of the models.

The results showed that the MLP obtained the best results based on the average of the stations with the values of (CC=0.85), (NMSE=0.63), (NSH=0.73) and (MAE=0.52), and LS-SVM and SDSM are ranked second and third, respectively. Taylor's diagram also identified the SDSM as the weakest and the LS-SVM and MLP as superior models with a slight difference. Based on downscaling results of all forecasting scenarios, an increase in average daily temperature is also predicted by 2100 in all studied stations.

Based on the results of the study, all forecasting scenarios and all methods of downscaling show increasing the daily average temperature by 2100. Hence, it is necessary to be taken this issue account for making environmental and developing policies in this area.