Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: North Carolina
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

We propose to create a comprehensive web-based dataset of high-resolution climate change projections that can be used to assess the impacts of climate change on ecosystems in the continental United States. The dataset will be generated by applying advanced statistical downscaling methods to a comprehensive selection of global climate model simulations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) database. To meet this objective we will hold a series of facilitated workshops to solicit input and disseminate information from researchers involved with the National Climate Change and Wildlife Science Center (NCCWSC). We will hold two workshops in FY2010 and a final, follow-up workshop in FY2011. The first workshop will involve researchers from funded NCCWSC proposals and other key stakeholders from DOI agencies. Participants will describe how downscaling approaches are used in their work and provide feedback on useful climatic variables relevant to ecosystem modeling efforts. In addition, the workshop will be an opportunity for participants to learn about different downscaling methods, global climate models, best practices for use of climate data (both observations and model output) and the structure of the proposed national downscaled climate dataset. We plan to hold this workshop in late winter 2010. A second workshop at the '3rd USGS All Modeling Conference' in Denver (June 2010) will consist of a half-day short course on global climate models, downscaling techniques, and the planned Geo Data Portal (GDP). We will hold a final workshop with potential data users in late 2010 or early 2011 to evaluate the proposed design of the GDP. These workshops will improve our final deliverables but also improve knowledge within the USGS and DOI community about climate change science and climate change scenarios.