Modeling climate risk where it hits home
Long-term assessment of likely regional and local climate impacts is critical to enabling municipalities, businesses, and regional economies to prepare for potentially damaging and costly effects of climate change — from prolonged droughts to more frequent and intense extreme events such as major storms and heatwaves. Unfortunately, the tools most commonly used to project future climate impacts, Earth-system models (ESMs), are not up to the task. ESMs are too computationally time consuming and too expensive to run at sufficient resolution to provide the detail needed at the local and regional level. To that end, a new MIT-led study in the journal Earth and Space Science uses a regional climate model of the northeastern United States to downscale the middle and end-of-century climate projections of an ESM under a high-impact emissions scenario to a horizontal resolution of 3 kilometers. Through downscaling, output from the ESM was used to drive the regional model at a higher spatial resolution, enabling it...