“…The stepwise‐clustered heatwave downscaling approach (i.e., SCHW) is developed in this study based on the stepwise clustering analysis (i.e., SCA). SCA is a nonparametric statistical method firstly proposed by Huang (1992) and has been widely used in previous studies (Huang et al ., 2006; Qin et al ., 2007; Sun et al ., 2009; Wang et al ., 2013, 2015; Fan et al ., 2017; Zhuang et al ., 2017; Guo et al ., 2018; Zhai et al ., 2019). Most of previously proposed statistical downscaling tools assume that each predictand of interest is a function of predictors (Beckmann and Adri Buishand, 2002; Wilby et al, 2002; Hessami et al, 2008; Gibson et al ., 2017), while the function might not be able to improve significantly the projection quality compared to the direct outputs of raw GCMs owing to the complexity of the climate system (Wilby et al, 2002; Wang et al ., 2013).…”