From USDA Climate Hubs:
In January 2024, the California Climate Hub partnered with the USDA Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region’s Climate Change Integration Team to put on “The Next Generation of Climate Models,” a webinar designed to educate land managers on recent evolutions in climate modeling. The Hub’s Research Program Manager and Project Scientist Dr. Lauren Parker was one of three presenters, alongside Dr. John Abatzoglou (Professor of Climatology at UC Merced) and Dr. Daniel R. Cayan (Research Meteorologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego).
After Dr. Parker introduced the topics of climate, climate change, and the basics of global climate modeling, Dr. Abatzoglou discussed the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6), an international climate modeling experiment that consists of over 100 different climate models from 49 different modeling groups around the world, and its differences compared to the project’s fifth phase (CMIP5). He also provided some examples of how global climate model data can be used by land managers in California. To round out the webinar, Dr. Cayan discussed data downscaling and LOCA2, his group’s publicly available dataset, downscaled from CMIP6 climate models.
Global Climate Models and Land Management: A Factsheet Series
To further the reach of this webinar, the California Climate Hub has created a series of four factsheets that build upon this material. The factsheet series aims to give readers a well-rounded understanding of global climate modeling and its relevance to land management.
Climate Fundamentals – This factsheet provides a primer on climate and weather and establishes a foundation for the remainder of the series.
Global Climate Models and Emissions Scenarios – This factsheet covers global climate models, emissions scenarios, and CMIP6.
Downscaling – This factsheet covers downscaling, the process that makes global climate model data useful at a local scale.
Applications of Global Climate Model Data – This factsheet covers common applications of global climate model data for natural land managers, providing examples.
While the factsheets in this series are complementary, they can also be used independently, so feel free to pick and choose based on your background knowledge and needs.
