Climate Explorer: Improved Access to Local Climate Projections

Abstract

The goal of the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit’s (CRT) Climate Explorer (CE) is to provide information at appropriate spatial and temporal scales to help practitioners gain insights into the risks posed by climate change. Ultimately, these insights can lead to groups of local stakeholders taking action to build their resilience to a changing climate. Using CE, decision-makers can visualize decade-by-decade changes in climate conditions in their county and the magnitude of changes projected for the end of this century under two plausible emissions pathways. They can also check how projected changes relate to user-defined thresholds that represent points at which valued assets may become stressed, damaged, or destroyed. By providing easy access to authoritative information in an elegant interface, the Climate Explorer can help communities recognize—and prepare to avoid or respond to—emerging climate hazards. Another important step in the evolution of CE builds on the purposeful alignment of the CRT with the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s (USGCRP) National Climate Assessment (NCA). By closely linking these two authoritative resources, we envision that users can easily transition from static maps and graphs within NCA reports to dynamic, interactive versions of the same data within CE and other resources within the CRT, which they can explore at higher spatial scales or customize for their own purposes. The provision of consistent climate data and information—a result of collaboration among USGCRP’s federal agencies—will assist decision-making by other governmental entities, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and individuals.

Assessing the use of climate change information in State Wildlife Action Plans

“…4 Model output from the Fifth IPCC assessment (IPCC, 2013) is available online as peerreviewed downscaled products intended for natural resource management, such as: the Multivariate Adaptive Constructed Analogs projections (MACA) 5 which now has online tools for visualizing the data and spread of the models (Abatzoglou & Brown, 2012); the localized constructed analogs product (LOCA) 6 (Pierce et al, 2014(Pierce et al, , 2015Vano et al, 2020); and products with hydrologic projections (Bureau of Reclamation, 2013). These products now power tools such as the Climate Toolbox (Williams et al, 2020) and the US Climate Resilience Toolkit's Climate Explorer 7 (Lipschultz et al, 2020) and have been used in the US National Climate Assessment (US Global Change Research Program, USGCRP, 2017) and the 4th California Climate Assessment (Pierce et al, 2018). A third version of the NatureServe CCVI is available, but still uses GCMs from the third IPCC ( 2007).…”

Local diversity in phenological responses of migratory lake sturgeon to warm winters

“…Although winters in the Huron-Erie Corridor region are projected to warm by approximately 2°C over the next few decades, the duration of our study was too short to assess any directional change in migratory phenology across years. In fact, the relationship between year and average late-winter air temperature was weak; compared to the historical average ; −1.26°C; <https://crtclimate-explorer.nemac.org>; Lipschultz et al 2020Lipschultz et al ), 2012Lipschultz et al , 2016Lipschultz et al and 2017 were warm (> 3°C above average), 2013, 2018 and 2019 were near average (within 1°C), and 2014 and 2015 were cold (~ 4°C below average). Furthermore, forecasting potential phenological shifts due to climate change remains challenging given the uncertain mechanisms underlying our results and the complex thermodynamics of the Laurentian Great Lakes.…”