PNNL

Abstract

The need for regional and local scale climate information is increasing rapidly as decision-makers must anticipate and manage a variety of context-specific climate risks over the next several decades. However, global climate models—a principal input to developing such information--1) are not developed with these user needs in mind and 2) typically operate at resolutions that are too coarse to provide actionable knowledge. Emerging high-resolution global modeling capabilities and statistical or dynamical downscaling techniques, have the potential to fill this need, but their relative strengths and weaknesses have not been systematically evaluated in various use contexts. Moreover, it is not clear which decision contexts require high-resolution information of what kind, nor how best to evaluate and communicate the degree to which decision-relevant features of the climate are reliably represented in high-resolution data products. A recent weeklong workshop hosted by the Aspen Global Change Institute sought to clarify and inform these gaps in understanding at the boundary of climate data provision and use.