Regional Variability of Seasonal Climate Change in NARCCAP

The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) dataset contains output from six different regional climate models (RCMs) driven by four different global climate models (GCMs), plus two time-slice experiments. Comparing spatially-varying fields from more than a few simulations simultaneously is a challenge; one approach is to distill the spatial dimension by averaging over climatically-similar regions.

We present regional average changes in seasonal climatology for surface air temperature and precipitation over the Bukovsky regionalization of North America. However, because there can be considerable spatial variation even within a climatically-coherent region, we also use a novel visualization to show the complete spread of change in climatology within each region for comparison with the regional mean results. We examine these results for systematic patterns or relationships associated with the RCMs and GCMs.