“…Improving regional projections (e.g., through variable selection or statistical downscaling) and characterizing natural variability (e.g., irreducible uncertainty at decadal scales: Sutton, 2009, 2011;Branstator and Teng, 2012;Deser et al, 2012a, b;Fischer et al, 2013;Hu and Deser, 2013;Rosner et al, 2014) are necessary for informing adaptation at stakeholder-relevant scales and planning horizons. As climate-related data approaches the scale of hundreds of petabytes (Overpeck et al, 2011) and climate data mining research continues to improve (Smyth et al, 1999;Robertson et al 2004Robertson et al , 2006Khan et al, 2006;Camargo et al, 2007a, b;Gaffney et al, 2007), new opportunities will emerge (e.g., Schneider et al, 2013;Monteleoni et al, 2013;Ganguly et al, 2013). The 2014 Climate Data Initiative (Lehmann, 2014) launched by the White House (United States President's Office) points to big data as a solution for climate adaptation and lends further urgency of the theme discussed in this manuscript.…”