The Engineer

Climate Wizard

News

A new web tool is able to generate coloured maps of projected temperature and precipitation changes using 16 of the world’s most prominent climate-change models.

Climate Wizard, a tool meant for scientists and non-scientists alike, is being demonstrated by The Nature Conservancy in Copenhagen, Denmark, in conjunction with the climate summit.

The new tool was developed by University of Washington’s Evan Girvetz, who worked with Chris Zganjar of The Nature Conservancy and George Raber of the University of Southern Mississippi.

‘Climate Wizard is meant to make it easier to explore climate data in an interactive way. It makes the data accessible in ways that are more intuitive, even for people who are not climate scientists,’ said Girvetz.

For example, data used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the science organisation evaluating the risks of climate change, is made visual and more readily understandable through Climate Wizard.

Climate Wizard lets users focus on states, countries or regions around the world and apply different scenarios to generate colour-coded maps of changes in temperature and precipitation that can, in turn, be used to consider things such as moisture stress in vegetation and freshwater supplies.

Users can choose from a number of parameters. For example, they can look at the climate of the past 50 years or projections for mid-century, the 2050s, or toward the end of the century, the 2080s. Among other variables, they can generate maps based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes’ estimates of greenhouse gas emissions being high, medium or low in the future.

Users can also consider the projections from each of 16 individual climate models. Girvetz recommends using one of the newest features added to the program: the ability to create an ensemble of some or all of the 16 models. If a user wants to average the temperatures of, say, the 12 climate models that forecast the largest temperature increases, Climate Wizard can do so almost instantaneously.

‘Ensembles can give a better range of future possible climate changes compared to using a single model,’ he said.

Find Climate Wizard at http://www.climatewizard.org