Evan Girvetz, (once a graduate student at UC Davis's Evolution and Ecology Graduate group stationed in ICE) et al, has created a tool for analyzing climate change in your region:
Applied Climate-Change Analysis - The Climate Wizard Tool
Abstract
Background: Although the message of ‘‘global climate change’’ is catalyzing international action, it is local and regional changes that directly affect people and ecosystems and are of immediate concern to scientists, managers, and policy makers. A major barrier preventing informed climate-change adaptation planning is the difficulty accessing, analyzing, and interpreting climate-change information. To address this problem, we developed a powerful, yet easy to use, web-based tool called Climate Wizard (http://ClimateWizard.org) that provides non-climate specialists with simple analyses and innovative graphical depictions for conveying how climate has and is projected to change within specific geographic areas throughout the world.
Methodology/Principal Findings: To demonstrate the Climate Wizard, we explored historic trends and future departures (anomalies) in temperature and precipitation globally, and within specific latitudinal zones and countries. We found the greatest temperature increases during 1951–2002 occurred in northern hemisphere countries (especially during January– April), but the latitude of greatest temperature change varied throughout the year, sinusoidally ranging from approximately 50uN during February-March to 10uN during August-September. Precipitation decreases occurred most commonly in
countries between 0–20uN, and increases mostly occurred outside of this latitudinal region. Similarly, a quantile ensemble analysis based on projections from 16 General Circulation Models (GCMs) for 2070–2099 identified the median projected change within countries, which showed both latitudinal and regional patterns in projected temperature and precipitation change.
Conclusions/Significance: The results of these analyses are consistent with those reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but at the same time, they provide examples of how Climate Wizard can be used to explore regionallyand temporally-specific analyses of climate change. Moreover, Climate Wizard is not a static product, but rather a data analysis framework designed to be used for climate change impact and adaption planning, which can be expanded to include other information, such as downscaled future projections of hydrology, soil moisture, wildfire, vegetation, marine conditions, disease, and agricultural productivity.
Citation: Girvetz EH, Zganjar C, Raber GT, Maurer EP, Kareiva P, et al. (2009) Applied Climate-Change Analysis: The Climate Wizard Tool. PLoS ONE 4(12): e8320.
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0008320
Editor: Anna Traveset, Institut Mediterrani d’Estudis Avanc¸ats (CSIC/UIB), Spain
Received July 11, 2009; Accepted November 21, 2009; Published December 15, 2009
Copyright: 2009 Girvetz et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: E. Girvetz was supported by a generous donation to The Nature Conservancy. G. Raber and C. Zganjar were supported by The Nature Conservancy Climate Change Program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
* E-mail: girvetz@u.washington.edu
