Development and Dissemination of High-Resolution National Climate Change Dataset
Dates
Publication Date
2013-03-22
Citation
Katharine Hayhoe, 2013-03-22, Development and Dissemination of High-Resolution National Climate Change Dataset: .
Summary
Climate change is a global problem whose impacts are experienced at the local to regional scale. For this reason, the first step in assessing the impacts of climate change—on a species or an ecosystem, on water resources, or on an aspect of human society such as energy demand or agriculture—is often to develop projections of how temperature, precipitation, and other important aspects of climate might be expected to change in the future at the location of interest. Global climate models produce future climate projections that are usually too coarse to capture the local characteristics that determine climate at any given location: the proximity of that location to a large body of water, for example, which would moderate extreme temperatures; [...]
Summary
Climate change is a global problem whose impacts are experienced at the local to regional scale. For this reason, the first step in assessing the impacts of climate change—on a species or an ecosystem, on water resources, or on an aspect of human society such as energy demand or agriculture—is often to develop projections of how temperature, precipitation, and other important aspects of climate might be expected to change in the future at the location of interest.
Global climate models produce future climate projections that are usually too coarse to capture the local characteristics that determine climate at any given location: the proximity of that location to a large body of water, for example, which would moderate extreme temperatures; or whether the location is in the arid “rain shadow” of a mountain.
In this project, we used an advanced statistical downscaling method that combines high-resolution observations with outputs from 16 different global climate models based on four future emission scenarios to generate the most comprehensive dataset of daily temperature and precipitation projections available for climate change impacts in the U.S. The gridded dataset covers the continental U.S., southern Canada, and northern Mexico at one-eighth degree resolution, and Alaska at one-half degree resolution. We also quality-controlled observations from over 10,000 long-term weather stations and generated projections for each of these locations.
The high-resolution projections produced by this work have been rigorously quality-controlled for both errors and biases in the global climate and statistical downscaling models. We also calculated projected future changes in a broad range of impact-relevant indicators, from seasonal temperature to extreme precipitation days. The results of the error and bias tests and the indicator calculations were made available as part of this database.
