<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD Journal Publishing DTD v3.0 20080202//EN" "https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/nlm-dtd/publishing/3.0/journalpublishing3.dtd">
<article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="research-article" specific-use="SMUR" dtd-version="3.0" xml:lang="en">
<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-5092</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>Trade-offs between predictive accuracy and distributional fidelity in surrogate modeling of extreme precipitation</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>El Moçayd</surname>
<given-names>Nabil</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3258-8537</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chaqdid</surname>
<given-names>Abdelaziz</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>International Water Research Institute (IWRI), College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (UM6P), Ben Guerir, Morocco</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Physical Science and Engineering Division (PSE), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal, Saudi Arabia</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>30</day>
<month>10</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>31</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Nabil El Moçayd</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5092/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5092/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5092/egusphere-2026-5092.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-5092/egusphere-2026-5092.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Extreme precipitation remains a major challenge for regional climate modeling due to strong nonlinearities, spatial heterogeneity, and sensitivity to poorly constrained parameterizations. In this study, we assess the ability of surrogate models to represent extreme precipitation under parametric uncertainty in a regional climate model. An ensemble of simulations is generated using Latin Hypercube sampling of key parameters in the SUBEX large-scale cloud and precipitation scheme, and several surrogate approaches are evaluated, including polynomial chaos expansions (PCE), Gaussian process regression (Kriging), hybrid Polynomial Chaos-Kriging (PCK), and stochastic spectral embedding (SSE).&lt;br /&gt;Model performance is assessed using both predictive metrics (RMSE, R&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt;) and distribution-based metrics (Kolmogorov--Smirnov distance, Wasserstein distance, Kullback--Leibler divergence, and Energy distance), with validation performed on an independent dataset. Results reveal a clear trade-off: PCK provides the most accurate pointwise predictions, whereas SSE more faithfully reproduces the statistical distribution of extreme precipitation, particularly in the upper tail. Notably, the observed event occupies a low-probability region of the modeled distribution, although its position varies spatially. This suggests that standard model configurations may struggle to reproduce the intensity of individual extreme events, as they are typically calibrated to capture mean climatological variability rather than rare extremes. Sensitivity analysis indicates that extreme precipitation variability is primarily controlled by parameters governing precipitation efficiency over land and ocean, while spatial analysis shows that uncertainty is concentrated in coastal and mountainous regions where nonlinear interactions are strongest.&lt;br /&gt;These findings demonstrate that no single surrogate model is optimal for all objectives and emphasize the need to distinguish between predictive accuracy and distributional fidelity when modeling extremes. They provide new insight into how model calibration, parameter uncertainty, and surrogate structure jointly influence the representation of extreme precipitation in climate simulations.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="31"/></counts>
</article-meta>
</front>
<body/>
<back>
</back>
</article>