Quantifying Very Extreme Precipitation and Temperature Using Huge Ensembles Generated by Machine Learning-Based Climate Model Emulators

Année de publication

2026

Weather extremes produce major impacts on society and ecosystems and are likely to change in likelihood and magnitude with climate change. However, very low-probability events are hard to characterize statistically using observations or even climate model output because of short records/runs. For precipitation, consideration of such events arises in quantifying probable maximum precipitation (PMP), namely, estimating extreme precipitation magnitudes for designing and assessing critical infrastructure. A recent National Academies report on modernizing PMP estimation proposed using very large climate model-based ensembles to estimate extreme quantiles, possibly through machine learning-based ensemble boosting. Here, we assess statistical aspects of such an approach for the contiguous United States using a huge ensemble (10?560 years) produced by a state-of-the-art emulator (ACE2) trained on ERA5 reanalysis. The results indicate that one can practically estimate very extreme precipitation and temperature quantiles, provided one uses appropriate statistical extreme value techniques. More specifically, the results provide evidence for 1) the use of threshold-exceedance methods with a sufficiently high threshold (necessary for precipitation) for reliable estimation, 2) the robustness of results to variation in extremes by season and storm type, and 3) the sufficiency of the ensemble for well-constrained statistical uncertainty. Our results also show that the emulator produces extremes outside the range of the ERA5 training data. While encouraging for emulators' potential use for quantifying the climatology of extremes, more investigation is needed to assess whether emulators are fit for this purpose. Our focus is on how to use huge ensembles to estimate very extreme statistics; we expect the results to be relevant for future improved emulators. Significance Statement Weather extremes produce major impacts on society and ecosystems and are likely to change in likelihood and magnitude with climate change. Machine learning now provides methods to simulate weather for many hypothetical years at much lower computational expense than traditional models. This could provide the opportunity to estimate the magnitude of very low-probability events using statistical methods applied to the simulation output, for use in planning, risk assessment, and adaptation. Our work finds that when used appropriately, statistical methods designed to analyze extremes can reliably estimate the magnitude of extremely high precipitation and temperature events in the United States, under the critical assumption that the machine learning method is a good mimic of real-world weather.</div>

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