Results

Overview of Regional Climate Change Projections

The paper "Regional climate change projections from NA-CORDEX and their relation to climate sensitivity" by Bukovsky & Mearns (2020, in Climatic Change) provides a basic overview of the climate change projections from the RCP8.5 runs in the NA-CORDEX data archive.

Perfect Model Downscaling Evaluation Web Atlas

The Web Atlas contains numerous maps showing analyses performed using the "Perfect Model" framework to evaluate different statistical downscaling methods. These analyses are based on temperature and precipitation data from NA-CORDEX simulations over CONUS.

A detailed User's Guide provides an explanation of the perfect model methodology, step-by-step instructions for using the atlas, and documentation of the analyses. This work was performed by the NOAA-ESRL Physical Sciences Laboratory.

NA-CORDEX Visualization Collection

Analyses of NA-CORDEX simulations outputs are now available on Google Drive. No registration or account is needed.

The Visualization Collection includes maps of current and future seasonal and annual average climatology and change for temperature and precipitation across different 30-year and 50-year periods. It also contains maps of bias vs the Daymet observational dataset.

The files are organized hierarchically into folders, but you may also find it useful to search by filename within a high-level folder to find various sets of files spanning multiple sub-folders. Right-click on a folder and select "Search within" to start a search restricted to files in that folder.

The figures are named systematically as follows:  RCM+GCM_grid_period_season_variable_scenario[_analysis].png

  • RCM: CCCma-CanRCM4 ISU-RegCM4 NCAR-RegCM4 NCAR-WRF SMHI-RCA4 UQAM-CRCM5
  • GCM: CCCma-CanESM2 HadGEM2-ES ICHEC-EC-EARTH MPI-M-MPI-ESM-LR MPI-M-MPI-ESM-MR NOAA-GFDL-GFDL-ESM2M
  • grid: 22 44 22i 44i
  • period: 1951-1999 1970-1999 2040-2069 2050-2099 2070-2099 1980-2005
  • season: ANN DJF JJA MAM SON
  • variable: pr tas huss prec rsds tmax tmin
  • scenario: hist rcp45 rcp85 eval
  • analysis: absdiff pctdiff absbias pctbias

(Note: terms in dark blue apply only to bias figures.)

So if you wanted to look at annual 50-year average temperature and precip for the historical WRF-HadGEM runs at both 50 km and 25 km, you could search for "*WRF*HadGEM*1951-1999*ANN*hist*" to see all those figures in one spot.

The NCL script used to generate these visualizations can be found here.

Cite figures from this collection (AMS style) as:

Rendfrey, T., M. Bukovsky, and S. McGinnis, 2018. "NA-CORDEX Visualization Collection" UCAR/NCAR, https://doi.org/10.5065/90ZF-H771.

See the DataCite record for other formats.