Alaska Climate Futures (mid and late 21st century) and Historical References (20th century)

To meet the climate change planning and adaptation needs of Alaska managers and decision makers, I developed a set of statewide summaries of available climate change projections that can be further subset using GIS techniques for requests by management unit, watershed, or other location. This facilitates the development of tailored climate futures for decision makers’ regional or subregional management context. This file describes the source data and summaries for purposes of technical /scientific documentation. The methods and presentation for these datasets were adapted from products in previous USGS-approved IP products for the AKCASC Building Resilience Today project (e.g, Community of Kotlik et al. 2019). For each data product included, summaries (averages or totals) are presented for multiple climate models or specific global warming levels and are average dover two time periods: 2040-2069, or the “2050s”, for near-term decision framing; and 2070-2099, or the “2080s”, for longer-term decision framing. In all cases where possible, both moderate emissions (RCP4.5 or +2C global level) and higher emissions (RCP8.5, or +4C global level) are presented. These choices (model averaging, temporal averaging, and scenario presentation) are tailored to the main sources of uncertainty (Hawkins and Sutton 2009) in climate model projections, specifically differences in climate model construction, climatic variability, and emissions scenario uncertainty (e.g., Littell et al. 2011, Snover et al. 2013, Terando et al. 2020). Not all scenario planning or climate impacts modeling needs can be met with these projections – these are intended to characterize a range of futures indicated by the available data products and facilitate further exploration of climate impacts modeling and adaptation development options.

                                            [
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                                            {
  "fn": "Jeremy Littell",
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                                            [
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