Downscaled Climate Change Modeling for the Conterminous United States (National Assessment)

This project produced long simulations (multi-decadal to multi-century in scale) of past, present, and future regional climate at a grid spacing of 50 kilometers (km) over North America and at a grid spacing of 15 km over western and eastern North America. These model runs were the first attempt to achieve coordinated, high-resolution downscaling with such wide geographic and temporal coverage. The objectives of this project were to (1) understand the nature of climate change and variability, (2) quantify the climate-driven responses and feedbacks of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, wildfire, the hydrologic cycle, and alpine glaciers, and (3) provide climate information in a form that is useful to a wide range of researchers, state and federal land managers, and non-governmental organizations. This work also resulted in an online web application to aid in visualization, inter-model comparison, and data dissemination of dynamically downscaled climate simulations based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emission scenarios.