Down-scaled IPCC Scenarios

This dataset simulates daily surfaces of temperature, precipitation, humidity, and radiation on a 1km grid over the conterminous United States.  Temperature and precipitation are generated by a modified version of WGEN (Weather Generator)(Richardson and Wright, 1984), conditioned by the 1km Daymet dataset estimates of these variables from 1980-2003.   Humidity and radiation variables are simulated by MtClim4 (Thornton et al., 2000).  Daily variables are based on future climate projections derived from coupled atmospheric-ocean global climate model experiments with transient greenhouse gas and sulfate aerosol forcing. The GCM model scenarios are downscaled from NCAR Community Climate System Model (CCSM) simulations for the IPCC SRESA1B Scenario.   The downscaling process depends critically on the PRISM dataset (www.prismclimate.org).


Download/plot a single grid point (1980 - 2049)

Attributions:

This dataset was developed under the sponsorship of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.

1.  Original work developing VEMAP2 techniques for daily disaggregation and spatial downscaling of GCM scenarios was funded by NASA Mission to Planet Earth, USDA Forest Service Global Change Research Program, and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI).  The daily disaggregation scheme is reported in Kittel et al. (2004, /Climate Research /27:151-170).

2.  This research uses data provided by the Community Climate System Model project (www.ccsm.ucar.edu), supported by the Directorate for Geosciences of the National Science Foundation and the Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy. In addition, the words 'Community Climate System Model' and 'CCSM' should be included as metadata for webpages referencing work using CCSM data or as keywords provided to journal or book publishers of your manuscripts. Users of CCSM data accept the responsibility of emailing citations of publications of research using CCSM data to ccsm@ucar.edu.  Any redistribution of CCSM data must include this data acknowledgement statement.

3.  Down-scaled IPCC Scenarios are provided by the Geophysical Statistics Project at NCAR (www.image.ucar.edu/GSP) and the NCAR GIS Initiative's GIS Climate Change Scenarios project (www.gisclimatechange.org). The downscaled data critically depend on both the PRISM dataset of the PRISM Group at Oregon State University (www.prismclimate.org) and data provided by the Community Climate System Model project (www.ccsm.ucar.edu). The CCSM project is supported by the Directorate for Geosciences of the National Science Foundation and the Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy.

4.  Daymet was developed at the University of Montana, Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group (NTSG).  This data is currently being distributed, free of charge, from the NTSG lab through its outreach component, the EOS Training Center Natural Resource Project. The Daymet U.S. database is indexed by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC), in their list of Regional and Global Data for Global Change Research.  The Daymet data is also available in downloaded regional 'tile's through NCAR's Community Data Portal.

References:

Richardson, C.W. 1981. Stochastic simulation of daily precipitation, temperature and solar radiation. Water Resources Research 17:182-190.

Richardson, C.W., and D.A. Wright. 1984. /WGEN: A Model for Generating Daily Weather Variables./ U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, ARS-8, p 83.

Thornton, P.E., H. Hasenauer, and M.A. White. 2000. Simultaneous estimation of daily solar radiation and humidity from observed temperature and precipitation: an application over complex terrain in Austria. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 104:255-271.