Spatially-resolved emulation of climate extremes via machine learning stochastic models

Emulators, or reduced-complexity models, serve as an ideal complement to earth system models (ESM) by providing the climate information under various scenarios at much lower computational costs. We develop an emulator of climate extremes that produce the temporal evolution of probability distributions of local variables on a spatially resolved grid. The representative modes of climate change are identified using principal component analysis (PCA), and the PCA time series are approximated using stochastic models. When applied to ERA5 data, the model accurately reproduces the quantiles of local daily maximum temperature and effectively captures the non-Gaussian statistics. We also discuss potential generalization of our emulator to different climate change scenarios.