Analyzing Changes in Future Extreme Events in New England using A New Dynamically Downscaled High Resolution Climate Dataset

New England has been experiencing frequent and costly extreme events such as land falling tropical cyclones, Nor’easters and heat waves. The cost of these impacts on regional economy and natural resources has been concerning for regional stakeholders. To assess climate change impacts and help create a more sustainable New England, as part of an NSF EPSCoR funded interdisciplinary effort, we create a unique high-resolution climate dataset for New England. We dynamically downscale global model projections under a high impact emissions scenario using the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) with three nested domains of 27, 9 and 3 km horizontal resolution with the highest resolution domain focusing over New England. We enable convection to be resolved in the highest resolution domain and use two way nesting with sophisticated parameterizations (e.g. two moment cloud microphysics scheme, Community Land surface Model (CLM) for land surface parameterization) to enable simulating small scale features and processes and their feedback on and interactions with the larger scale processes. We simulate three time slices 2006-2015, 2040-2060 and 2080-2100 using 45-daily simulations for each month and eliminating the first 15 days for initialization. We introduce this new dynamically downscaled high-resolution climate dataset focusing on future changes in New England extreme events. The dataset will be available for public use to facilitate further climate change impacts assessments for New England. For all simulated time periods, more than 200 model variables will be available in hourly (six hourly) intervals for the highest resolution domain (outer two domains) along with model input and restart files used in WRF.