Final Memo: Synthesis of climate model downscaling products for the southeastern United States
Dates
Acquisition
2015-09-29
Citation
Ryan Boyles, Final Memo: Synthesis of climate model downscaling products for the southeastern United States: .
Summary
Climate change is likely to have many effects on natural ecosystems in the Southeast U.S. While there is information available to conservation managers and ecologists from the global climate models (GCMs), this information is at too coarse a resolution for use in vulnerability assessments and decision making. To better assess how climate change could affect multiple sectors, including ecosystems, climatologists have created several downscaled climate projections that contain information from GCMs translated to regional or local scales. There are a number of techniques that can be used to create downscaled climate projections, and the number of available downscaled climate projections present challenges to users deciding what to use [...]
Summary
Climate change is likely to have many effects on natural ecosystems in the Southeast U.S. While there is information available to conservation managers and ecologists from the global climate models (GCMs), this information is at too coarse a resolution for use in vulnerability assessments and decision making. To better assess how climate change could affect multiple sectors, including ecosystems, climatologists have created several downscaled climate projections that contain information from GCMs translated to regional or local scales. There are a number of techniques that can be used to create downscaled climate projections, and the number of available downscaled climate projections present challenges to users deciding what to use in their applications. The goals of this project were to assess the needs to ecologists in the Southeast U.S. for downscaled climate projections, synthesize the information available, and evaluate a selection of downscaled climate projections based upon the needs of the ecological community in the Southeast. The report produced is a guide which enables the Southeast Climate Science Center to address an important strategic goal of providing scientific information and guidance that will enable resource managers and others in the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives to make science-based climate change adaptation decisions.
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Final Report.pdf
1.24 MB
application/pdf
Purpose
The information synthesis and evaluation of downscaled projections across the Southeast is necessary to
provide guidance to users of downscaled projections. This is necessary to provide guidance on the
creation and appropriate use of downscaled projections. While this has been considered broadly in the
climate science community, it is necessary to consider this with regards to the specific information needs
of ecologists and natural resource managers in the Southeast. As such the main objective of the project
was to summarize the methods and approaches used to appropriately downscale coarse climate model
guidance for use at local scales, identify the metrics most appropriate for evaluation of climate model skill
and usability of climate model projections for the ecology and conservation communities, and being a
longer-term effort to evaluate a collection of downscaled climate products over the Southeastern United
States.
We were able to address the objectives proposed. There were no major differences between what was
proposed and the resulting work. The resulting report summarized the strengths and weaknesses of the
many kinds of downscaling techniques, including previous literature on the accuracy of such techniques
and the influence on the guidance provided by output datasets created with such techniques. The initial
evaluation of several downscaled climate projections begins the longer-term evaluation effort proposed.
In addition to beginning this effort, the evaluation and associated narrative describes the considerations
that an ecologist or natural resource manager should take before choosing a downscaled climate
projection to use in their impact assessment or decision.
Communities
National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers
