ClimateDesk: Leveraging Premier Climate Model Ensembles and Advanced Downscaling Techniques for Business-Ready Insights

Enterprises require reliable climate projections across various timescales to effectively identify asset-level risk and proactively implement mitigation strategies in response to climate change. Traditionally, climate modeling organizations focus on either near-term or long-term forecasts, each with different spatial resolutions and expected outcomes. This inconsistency can make it challenging for users unfamiliar with weather and climate science to accurately interpret the forecasts' implications.

Maxar’s ClimateDesk provides probabilistic insights for temperatures, precipitation and wind speeds, catering to a wide range of use cases by consolidating, harmonizing and integrating diverse forecasts from reputable climate modeling groups into a single platform. This platform covers timescales from sub seasonal periods to centennial projections to the year 2100, maintaining a consistent 0.25-degree spatial resolution globally. Additionally, it has the capability to refine forecasts to a high resolution of 1 km for any region.

The presentation outlines the design of Maxar's blended climate forecast, highlighting its multi model and multiscale ensemble system and the probabilistic forecast insights. It also discusses validation results against observations and comparable publicly available climate forecasts. The evaluation of 2015-2023 hindcasts using categorical metrics for various events and thresholds demonstrates that the system consistently achieves high accuracy and reliability. The hindcast evaluation for the 1991-2020 base period shows improved continuous rank probability scores across various climatic conditions, emphasizing the system's enhanced ability to provide accurate probabilistic forecasts for risk assessment and strategic planning.