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Different societal measures to tackle expected or already ocurring climate change impacts to reduce risk and vulnerability.
The change in climate between two time periods, typically 30 years long. The changes can be driven by different processes, and can be a mix of natural variability and changes in greenhouse gas concentrations.
Climatic data of past or future conditions obtained by observations or outputs from climate models.
A Climate Indicator (CI) is an aggregate statistic of a variable in a climatological period. The global mean temperature is one often used CI. Climate change can be assessed by comparing CIs for different climatological time periods.
Climate models are our main tools for describing climate for both future and historic climate. Scientists often use climate models to study how the climate may change when the composition of the atmosphere changes with, for example, changed levels of greenhouse gases and aerosols.
Variations below or above the long-term mean of the climate. The variations are due to either natural processes within the climate system or variations due to anthropogenic forcing or other climate drivers.
A climate scenario is a description of a possible future development of the climate as assessed in global climate models using different emission scenarios.
CMIP is the standard experimental protocol for studying the output of global climate models.
CORDEX is the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling experiment. CORDEX is responsible to advance and coordinate the science and application of regional climate downscaling models through global partnerships.
When results from a coarser model are recalculated with a regional climate model, or a statistical method, to give more detailed results.
Emission scenarios describe possible anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, based on assumptions about the future development of the world’s economy, population growth, globalization, transition to environmentally friendly technology and more.
An ensemble is a collection of multiple climate model scenarios. 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 about initial conditions, sensitivity of processes, future emissions and natural variability.
The most common greenhouse gases that are now changing are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone.
Cells or boxes that represent a computational unit of the climate model.
Global climate models describe the entire globe and the processes that take place in the atmosphere, land and ocean.
A regional climate model describes a part of the globe, a region. They are used to include more details than global climate models.
The climate-modelling community has developed RepresentativeConcentration Pathways (RCPs) that are emission scenarios used for climate modeling and research. The scenarios describe different climate futures that may occur depending on the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) emitted until the year 2100.
Read more: What is RCP?
Climatological reference periods are 30-year periods that make it possible to compare the climate between different locations and to study how the climate changes in a location. The reference period used in the Climate Information Portal is 1981-2010.
The horizontal size of the grids of a climate model.
SSP, “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways”, is a number of scenarios that describe different socioeconomic developments and emissions of greenhouse gases, which are used in climate models.
Read more: What is SSP?
A climate variable is a variable that is measurable in the field or calculated by climate models, such as temperature, precipitation, river discharge, etc.