A global climate model with a grid cell the size of a small country is not much use to a county planning officer deciding where to site the next borehole. Downscaling is the unglamorous work that makes climate projections locally actionable.
We applied statistical downscaling to global climate model outputs across a set of counties with markedly different topography and rainfall regimes, then validated the downscaled projections against two decades of observed station data before taking them into county planning workshops.
The downscaled projections diverged meaningfully from the coarse-resolution originals in exactly the terrain where it mattered most: highland counties with sharp rainfall gradients over short distances, where a single global grid cell averaged away information a planning decision actually needed.
From projection to planning decision
The workshops surfaced a recurring gap: planners could interpret a downscaled rainfall projection but struggled to translate it directly into an infrastructure siting or budget decision without an intermediate step connecting projection to local design standards.
We are now developing that intermediate layer — translation guidance that pairs downscaled projections directly with infrastructure design thresholds already in use by county engineers, rather than leaving that translation to happen informally or not at all.