Downscaling extremes: A comparison of extreme value distributions in point-source and gridded precipitation data [postprint]

However, understanding these issues is limited by a fundamental issue of spatial scaling: most evidence of past trends comes from rain gauge data, whereas trends into the future are produced by climate models, which rely on gridded aggregates.

To study this further, we fit the Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution to the right tail of the distribution of both rain gauge and gridded events. The results of this modeling exercise confirm that return values computed from rain gauge data are typically higher than those computed from gridded data; however, the size of the difference is somewhat surprising, with the rain gauge data exhibiting return values sometimes two or three times that of the gridded data.