The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program: Overview of Climate Change Results

The North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) is an international program that is serving the climate scenario needs of the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico. We are systematically investigating the uncertainties in regional scale projections of future climate and producing high resolution climate change scenarios using multiple regional climate models (RCMs) and multiple global model responses by nesting the RCMs within atmosphere ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs) forced with a medium-high emissions scenario, over a domain covering the conterminous US, northern Mexico, and most of Canada. The project also includes a validation component through nesting the participating RCMs within the NCEP reanalysis R2. The basic spatial resolution of the RCM simulations is 50 km. This program includes six different RCMs that have been used in various intercomparison programs in Europe and the United States. Four different AOGCMs provide boundary conditions to drive the RCMS for 30 years in the current climate and 30 years for the mid 21st century. The resulting climate model simulations form the basis for multiple high resolution climate scenarios that can be used in climate change impacts and adaptation assessments over North America. All 12 sets of current and future simulations have been completed. Measures of uncertainty across the multiple simulations are being developed by geophysical statisticians. In this overview talk, results from the various climate change experiments for various subregions, along with measures of uncertainty, will be presented