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The South-Central U.S. is home to diverse climates and ecosystems, strong agricultural and energy sectors, and fast-growing urban areas. All share a critical need for water, which is becoming an increasingly scarce resource across the region as aquifers are overdrawn and populations grow. Understanding what brings rain to this region, and how the timing and amount of precipitation may be affected by climate change, is essential for effective water planning and management. However, currently available information on long-term precipitation trends for the South Central region is often perceived to be irrelevant to community planners and water managers, due to multiple factors including mismatches between the time...
Suppose you are a city planner, regional water manager, or wildlife conservation specialist who is asked to include the potential impacts of climate variability and change in your risk management and planning efforts. What climate information would you use? The choice is often regional or local climate projections downscaled from global climate models (GCMs; also known as general circulation models) to include detail at spatial and temporal scales that align with those of the decision problem. A few years ago this information was hard to come by. Now there is Web-based access to a proliferation of high-resolution climate projections derived with differing downscaling methods.
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...