Theme: 1. Adaptation

Topic Area: 1b. Climate Risk Assessment for Government, Commercial, Civilian Resilience

Background/Objectives:

A broad community of practitioners, stakeholders and policymakers rely on historical reconstructions and future projections of local to regional climate. However, to be of value to these users, climate data must be both credible and salient. Credibility means that the data are produced in a manner consistent with physical laws, while salience requires that data be relevant for informing the decision-making process. Numerous climate data products have recently emerged that represent the contiguous United States at scales which are of value for decision-makers. These include dynamically downscaled products, which use self-consistent regional climate models to simulate regional meteorology, and statistically downscaled products, which are produced by constructing functional relationships between spatially coarse climate model outputs and local-scale meteorological conditions. While these products have been used to assess both historic and future climate risk, little effort has been put into ascertaining the credibility of these products for this purpose. Often researchers and practitioners will use a particular product because of word-of-mouth or because of collaborations with a particular climate research group. Consequently, there is a significant need for standardization in the protocol for assessing these products to ensure they are suitable for climate projection.

Approach/Activities:

A recent workshop held at University of California Berkeley in November 2023 featured broad inter-agency representation to discuss the current state of decision-relevant regional climate data products. This workshop identified three grand challenges related to these data products, including: a common framework for decision-relevant climate data that includes standard variable names and file metadata; a common framework for climate data product evaluation, including metrics, diagnostics and other relevant criteria; and cyberinfrastructure to support cataloguing and provisioning of decision-relevant climate data products. The workshop also concluded there is a need for a community of practice around decision-relevant climate data products to motivate collaboration and communication among data producers, users, evaluators, and other relevant personnel.

Results/Lessons Learned:

Work is underway to understand the space of decision-relevant climate data products and discuss how these data products can be best utilized by decision-makers to constrain uncertainties in future climate projections. In this presentation we will discuss the current state of this work, and efforts that are underway to tame the space of decision-relevant climate data products. These efforts include cataloguing available data products, investigating the problems for which different products are well suited (or poorly suited) and quantifying the performance of these products under standard metrics. By considering multiple products within a single framework, we can better ascertain our confidence in future projections by seeing where there is agreement and disagreement within the ensemble. This work has direct relevance to, and is conducted in conjunction with decision-makers and climate data users.

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Daniel Feldman