Identification

Title

Mapping model agreement on future climate projections

Abstract

Climate change projections are often based on simulations from multiple global climate models and are presented as maps with some form of stippling or measure of robustness to indicate where different models agree on the projected anthropogenically forced changes. The criteria used to determine model agreement, however, often ignore the presence of natural internal variability. We demonstrate that this leads to misleading presentations of the degree of model consensus on the sign and magnitude of the change if the ratio of the signal from the externally forced change to internal variability is low. We present a simple alternative method of depicting multimodel projections which clearly separates lack of climate change signal from lack of model agreement by assessing the degree of consensus on the significance of the change as well as the sign of the change. Our results demonstrate that the common interpretation of lack of model agreement in precipitation projections is largely an artifact of the large noise from climate variability masking the signal, an issue exacerbated by performing analyses at the grid point scale. We argue that separating more clearly the case of lack of agreement from the case of lack of signal will add valuable information for stake-holders' decision making, since adaptation measures required in the two cases are potentially very different.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7571cnj

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2011-12-13T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact