Natural risk studies such as flood risk assessments require long series of weather variables. As an alternative to observed series, which have a limited length, these data can be provided by weather generators. Among the large variety of existing ones, resampling methods based on analogues have the advantage of guaranteeing the physical consistency between local variables at each time step. However, they cannot generate values of predictands exceeding the range of observed values. Moreover, the length of the simulated series is typically limited to the length of the synoptic meteorology records used to characterize the large-scale atmospheric configuration of the generation day. To overcome those limitations, the stochastic weather generator proposed in this study combines two sampling approaches based on atmospheric analogues: (1) a synoptic weather generator in a first step, which recombines days in the 20th century to generate a 1000-year sequence of new atmospheric trajectories and (2) a stochastic downscaling model in a second step, applied to these atmospheric trajectories, in order to simulate long time series of daily regional precipitation and temperature. The method is applied to daily time series of mean areal precipitation and temperature in Switzerland. It is shown that the climatological characteristics of observed precipitation and temperature are adequately reproduced. It also improves the reproduction of extreme precipitation values, overcoming previous limitations of standard analog-based weather generators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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