How to estimate local/regional climate change?
The climate indicators provided are the end result of a long chain of model simulations and statistical calculations. Here, we provide a general overview of how to estimate local changes…
Knowledge base
Data Variables
What is a climate indicator?
Climate Indicators (CI) are: Summaries of past and projected climate change, observed and projected changes affecting nature and society; Condensed climate information for climate impact assessment so users do not have…
What is CMIP and CORDEX?
Climate Indicators (CI) are available in the two tools of Climate Information; the Site-Specific report and the Data Access platform. The CI are calculated from ensembles of Global and Regional Climate…
What do different RCPs mean?
Future greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations are difficult to predict and depend on future developments such as future population growth, economic growth, energy use, uptake of renewable energy, technological change,…
What is a climate model and projections?
A climate model is a set of numerical simulations of important physical process involving the land, atmosphere, ocean, and ice-covered regions around the globe. Climate models are used to simulate…
Data Production and Tailoring
Which method was used to bias adjust Global and Regional climate variables
CORDEX and CMIP5 variables are bias adjusted using the Distribution Based Scaling method (DBS; Yang et al., 2010) versus the global reference dataset HydroGFD2.0 (Berg et al., 2018). Both bias…
Problems discovered while processing the climate model data
Climate model data is not perfect and sometimes deviations in data are identified when performing quality controls. Scientific analysts should be aware of these variations when using the data. Here,…
Global Forcing Data for Hydrology
HydroGFD (Hydrological Global Forcing Data) is a merged data set of historical precipitation and temperature from meteorological reanalysis and global observations. The reanalysis system ERA-Interim from ECMWF uses atmospheric and…
Which quality controls are done when producing indicators?
There is a detailed workflow to calculate the Climate and water Indicators (CI) provided in the two tools of Climate Information; the Site-specific report and the Data Access Platform. Many…
How to produce climate indicators?
Climate Indicators are calculated from two well trusted and globally known climate scientific communities: Global Climate Models (GCM) used in the Coupled Model Intercomparison project Phase 5 (CMIP5) Coordinated Regional…
What is Statistical and Dynamical downscaling?
Global Climate Models (GCMs) are important tools to assess the impact of future greenhouse gas concentration on changes in temperature, precipitation and wind speed. However GCMs are run at a very coarse…
Why select an area for download of data instead of a single point?
Climate impact assessments are often made for local scales, using results from regional or global climate models, which cover a large spatial area. When using these results for local, small-scale…
Why is there a spread of values in the Ensembles?
The estimates of climate-change impact include large uncertainties, therefore an ensemble of projections is presented. The ensembles contain a spread of values that reflect the lack of knowledge, for instance…
Why use a model ensemble?
A climate model is a numerical representation of the climate system, and thus not a perfect description of the system. The description of the physical laws governing the climate system…
Confidence and Robustness
How to interpret ensemble value range?
The ensemble value range (interquartile range) is a confidence measure that provides information about the ensemble spread of the projected climate change signals. The ensemble value range indicates the range…
How to interpret agreement on sign of change?
The agreement on sign of change is a confidence metric based on the number of models agreeing on a decrease, no change or an increase in the climate change signal…
How to explore confidence in the data?
The data and results are based on state of the art modelling systems combining widely used regional climate models and three different large scale hydrological models. The indicator data presented in the…
Climate Model Details
How to access daily time-series from climate models?
Climate models produce daily time-series for a specific grid of a geographical domain; bearing in mind that these results are not representing a specific day but general statistics, these time-series…
What CMIP5 Global models are available and which have been used?
Complete list of CMIP5 Global models and for which RCP indicators have been produced and made available at climateinformation.org. CMIP5 GCM ensembles Institute GCM Name Scenario CSIRO-BOM ACCESS1-0 rcp45, rcp85…
What CORDEX Regional models are available and which have been used?
Complete list of CORDEX Regional models for each domain, with the GCM and RCM combination, the used realization and for which RCP (2.6, 4.5, 8.5) indicators have been produced and…