CCDP: A GIS- and Web-Based Climate Change Data Portal for Better Decision Making

While mitigating climate change would require substantial and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through worldwide consensus and collaborations, adapting to climate change has become a major focus of local policy makers and development practitioners. Sound decisions rely on impact-based modeling, but the coarse-resolution outputs of global climate models (GCMs) are unsuitable for driving impact models, which usually require finer resolution projections at both spatial and temporal scales. Effective downscaling of GCMs projections is thus required, but it is practically difficult due to the lack of computational resources and/or long-term reference data. Such difficulty has become a major barrier preventing informed climate change adaptation planning at regional scales. To address this challenge, a GIS- and web-based climate change data portal will be established to allow intuitive and open access to high-resolution climate scenarios, thus to support decision making of effective climate policies at both regional and local scales. The developed data portal is named Climate Change Data Portal (CCDP) and is available to the public at http://ccdp.network. The current version of CCDP contains four entries to the high-resolution climate projections for Canada (Canada CCDP, http://canadaccdp.ca), China (China CCDP, http://chinaccdp.org), Canadian Prairies (Prairie CCDP, http://prairieccdp.ca), and the Province of Ontario (Ontario CCDP, http://ontarioccdp.ca), respectively. CCDP offers functions of visual representation through geospatial maps and data downloading for a variety of climate variables (e.g., temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, solar radiation, and wind) at multiple temporal resolutions (i.e., annual, seasonal, monthly, daily, and hourly). The vast amount of climate information encompassed by CCDP can provide a crucial basis for assessing impacts of climate change on local communities and ecosystems and for supporting better decision making under a changing climate.