New data available on the Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) research program’s data portal allows for climate modeling at the regional and watershed level, where it previously had not been possible. This higher resolution data is useful for developing tools for climate smart agriculture like conservation planning and crop modeling. And thanks to a new user-friendly search engine, the information is more accessible than ever to a wide variety of stakeholders. The following is an excerpt from a post originally published on CCAFS’s blog on January 27, 2014.
If you were wondering what that delicious smell is coming from the CCAFS kitchen, it’s probably the climate data we just pulled out of the oven.
The CCAFS-Climate data portal recently released downscaled, ready-to-be-used data corresponding to the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report (AR5). The data include around 25 Global Climate Models (GCMs) for four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) and four time periods (2030s, 2050s, 2070s and 2080s).
CCAFS-Climate, created in 2008, houses thousands of gigabytes worth of global datasets for climate change projections that can be used in climate change impact assessments. The difference between these data and, say, those provided by GCMs at raw resolution is that they have been downscaled to make them useful on smaller scales and in countries for which complicated Regional Climate Models are not available.
Even though GCMs can be very precise, their results come on scales on the order of 100 km – too large to be of use when trying to calculate climate risks for a municipality, region or watershed. Downscaling techniques allow researchers to obtain regional rather than global predictions of climatic changes, and in fact, statistical methods (such as the delta method used with these CMIP5 data) can reach resolutions as fine as 1 km or less.
Without these high-resolution data inputs, the production of precise and accessible assessment tools for conservation planning, niche modeling, crop modeling or biodiversity monitoring would be greatly hindered, if not impossible.
Continue reading on the CCAFS blog…
Photo courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
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