Integrated climate change information for resilient adaptation planning

The teams of scientists are working with stakeholders to provide the integrated knowledge base for the development of regional climate change adaptation plans to minimize the impacts of climate change. Global climate models (GCM) are the mathematical representations of the behavior of the Earth's climate system through time. They simulate the movement and interactions of energy, moisture, and heat through the ocean, atmosphere, land, and ice. Another is regional climate model (RCM) that is similar to the models used for global modeling, except it runs at higher spatial resolution over a limited portion of the globe and with different representations of some fine-scale physical processes. The higher resolution helps improve the depiction of land and water surfaces, and elevation, in the RCM. Regional climate models play a key role in impact assessments, such as forecasting of air quality under changing climate conditions. Another tool is statistical downscaling that has been used extensively for impact assessment in the United States.