Climate Model Projections
Target User Community: As with the other resources provided through climate.data.gov, this page is primarily intended for audiences, such as data innovators, who want to use government data to develop tools to help others learn about the impacts of climate change or make decisions in which climate change plays a role. There are a number of important use considerations for the data provided here. Please click here for guidance notes to read before making use of these data. What types of data are available? The links below provide access to a growing body of data, generated by climate models, relevant to understanding potential future climate change. This includes raw climate model output, as well as model output that has been processed by “bias correction” (removal of some known errors) and/or “downscaling” (addition of finer spatial detail). We refer to these types of information collectively as “climate simulation results.” These data have been produced using the leading climate research models, whose outputs have informed important scientific assessments of climate change and its impacts, such as the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports and the National Climate Assessment. They have been collected into several archives and portals for increased ease of access to outputs from multiple models and types of simulations.
In addition, scenarios.globalchange.gov provides scenarios: quantitative and narrative descriptions of plausible future conditions that provide assumptions for analyses of potential impacts and responses to climate change. Scenarios are ways to help understand what future conditions might be, with each scenario an example of what might happen under different assumptions. Scenarios generally blend both model output and other information, such as observed trends. They are not predictions or forecasts, and no probabilities are associated with them. Instead, they provide a range of future conditions to bound uncertainty. The scenarios accessed through scenarios.globalchange.gov include climate change, sea level change, and land use and population change. They are based on peer-reviewed, published sources and were used in the development of the National Climate Assessment, which provides scientific findings about climate change and its impacts on U.S. regions and key socioeconomic sectors.
Downscaled CMIP3 and CMIP5 Climate and Hydrology Projections
: “Downscaled” (finer-resolution) versions of monthly and daily temperature and precipitation from most of the GCM simulations in the PCMDI CMIP3 and CMIP5 archives, for CONUS, using two downscaling methods. In addition, derived simulations of surface hydrology are provided.
NASA NEX DCP30 National Climate Change Viewer (NCCV)
: Ultra-fine resulution downscaled versions of CMIP5 GCM results, with derived resulst for surface hdrology, for CONUS.
Regional Climate Change Viewer (RCCV)
: Tool to visualize dynamically downscaled GCM results
MACA CMIP5 Archive
: Empirically-downscaled results from CMIP5 GCMs.
North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP)
: Dynamically downscaled results from CMIP3 GCMs, for North America.
Sponsor: Multiple Fed/Univ/NGO
URL: https://gdo-dcp.ucllnl.org/downscaled_cmip_projections/
Summary: This archive contains fine spatial resolution translations of climate projections over the contiguous United States (U.S.) developed using two downscaling techniques (monthly BCSD Figure 1, and daily BCCA Figure 2), and hydrologic projections over the western U.S. (roughly the western U.S. Figure 3) corresponding to the monthly BCSD climate projections. Archive content is based on global climate projections from the World Climate Research Programme’s (WCRP’s) Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 3 (CMIP3) multi-model dataset referenced in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report, and the phase 5 (CMIP5) multi-model dataset that informed much of the IPCC Fifth Assessment. The downscaled data archive also includes GCM results that have been interpolated to a common, 1 deg. (latitiude) by 1 deg. (longitude) horizontal grid (but not downscaled), as well as GCM results that have been interpolated to the 1×1 degree grid and “bias corrected,” but not downscaled.
Sponsor: NASA/USGS
URL: https://www2.usgs.gov/climate_landuse/clu_rd/nccv/viewer.asp
Summary: To derive higher resolution data for regional climate change assessments, NASA applied a statistical technique to downscale maximum and minimum air temperature and precipitation from 33 of the CMIP5 climate models to a very fine, 800-m grid over the continental United States (CONUS). The full NEX-DCP30 dataset covers the historical period (1950-2005) and 21st century (2006-2099) under four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) emission scenarios developed for AR5. The USGS National Climate Change Viewer (NCCV) includes the historical and future climate projections from 30 of the CMIP5 models, downscaled to an 800-m grid over the continental United States under the NASA NEX-DCP30 project, for two of the RCP emission scenarios (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5). USGS has also used the downscaled temperature and precipitation data from these 30 CMIP5 models as input to a simple water-balance model to simulate changes in the surface water balance (snow water equivalent, runoff, soil water storage and evaporative deficit) over the historical and future time periods on the 800-m CONUS grid. Combining the climate data with the water balance data in the NCCV provides further insights into the potential for climate-driven change in water resources. The NCCV shows averages of the climate and water balance data over four climatology periods: 1950-2005, 2025-2049, 2050-2074, and 2075-2099. The viewer provides a number of useful tools for characterizing climate change including maps, climographs (plots of monthly averages), histograms that show the distribution or spread of the model simulations, monthly time series spanning 1950-2099, and tables that summarize changes in the quantiles (median and extremes) of the variables. The application also provides access to comprehensive, summary reports in PDF format and CSV files of the temperature and precipitation data for each geographic area.
Sponsor: USGS/Oregon State Univ.
URL: https://regclim.coas.oregonstate.edu/visualization/rccv/
Summary: The Regional Climate Change Viewer (RCCV) allows a user to visualize model output from the Dynamical Downscaling project as averages of model grid cell values over selected bounding polygons. Currently, averages over telescoping political outlines (states and counties) and hydrologic units (HUC2, HUC4, HUC8) are provided. The RCCV can be used to investigate a subset of the more than 60 variables available in the data sets including air temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, snow water equivalent (SWE), growing degree days and evapotranspiration.
Sponsor: Multiple Fed/University of Idaho
URL: https://maca.northwestknowledge.net/
Summary: This archive contains output from 20 global climate models (GCMs) of the Coupled Model Inter-Comparison Project 5 (CMIP5) for the historical GCM forcings (1950-2005) and the future Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) RCP 4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios (2006-2100). This CMIP5 output is downscaled from the native resolution of the GCMS to either 4-km or ~6-km using the Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analogs(MACA) method, a statistical downscaling method which utilizes a training dataset (i.e. a meteorological observation dataset) to remove historical biases and match spatial patterns in climate model output.
Sponsor: NSF, DOE, NOAA, EPA, Ouranos (Canada)
URL: https://www.narccap.ucar.edu/
Summary: “The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) is an international program to produce high resolution climate change simulations in order to investigate uncertainties in regional scale projections of future climate and generate climate change scenarios for use in impacts research.
