Making Climate Data Accessible: Methods for Producing NEX-GDDP and LOCA Downscaled Climate Indicators

Abstract

The change in climate, fueled by the increase in global greenhouse gas concentrations, will alter our relationship with the planet, impacting agriculture, infrastructure, disaster management, and human conflict, among others. It is critical to anticipate these new trends so we can understand and adapt to variations in crop productivity, energy demand, disaster risk, and water resource management. Climate models provide projections of how weather patterns are expected to shift over time. But climate data are difficult to access, process, and utilize, and the information that can be derived from them is largely underused. In this paper, we describe the process used to summarize global climate data into simple indicators and publish them as open datasets in common geospatial formats. We attempt to lower the barriers to using climate data so they can more easily be used to inform decisions on how to adapt to a changing climate. The climate data are visualized and available for download at PREPdata and Resourc Watch. Source code to produce these data is available on GitHub.