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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.
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    An official website of the GSA's Technology Transformation Services

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