Applications of Climate Downscaling in the Main Hawaiian Islands: Balancing Climate Modelers’ Products and Impact Modelers’ Expectations

High-resolution projections of future terrestrial climate conditions for the high Hawaiian islands (Hawaiʻi Island, Maui Nui, Oʻahu, and Kauaʻi) have been developed using statistical and dynamical downscaling methods. A “Workshop on Climate Downscaling and its Application in the High Hawaiian Islands” (https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/ofr20161102) was held in 2015 to address questions from natural resource managers about how to integrate climate-related projections into their resource management decisions. Since the 2015 workshop, additional climate modeling has been done. New projections for the same places using familiar modeling techniques remained dissimilar, and a completely new modeling effort appears to be producing results [...]