Downscaling #
Posted Thursday 25th June 2009 05:59 GMT
"down to a 25km square. You can enter your postcode and find out how your street will be affected by global warming in 2040 or 2080."
No, you can obtain a probabilistic forecast of the mean (monthly/seasonal) climate conditions within that 25km square. The results are available for different emission scenarios, and each has a high level of uncertainty. As others have mentioned, this is a downscaling exercise from the results of lower resolution climate runs (using either statistical techniques or via nested regional models)....downscaled from something like this:
http://ukclimateprojections.defra.gov.uk/content/view/1288/545/index.html
Even the relatively low resolution (3.75deg x 2.5deg) hadcm2/hadcm3 runs provide some measure of UK regional variability...the newer hadGEM is twice this resolution. This will give some indication of the impacts of large scale climatic factors (e.g., general hemispheric warming, changes in the Arctic Oscillation). The downscaling attempts to account for localized forcing/feedbacks (e.g., topography, land use).


