NARCCAP: High-Resolution Climate Projections for North America

North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP) data provides high-resolution climate change simulations for the conterminous United States and most of Canada. The program ran regional climate models at 50 km resolution, driven by global circulation models, for historical (1971-2000) and future (2041-2070) periods under the SRES A2 emissions scenario. It also includes preliminary model evaluation runs using reanalysis data from 1979-2004.

Use Cases

• Analyzing uncertainties in regional climate projections based on the ensemble of regional and global climate models.
• Generating climate change scenarios for impacts research based on the high-resolution 50 km simulations.
• Evaluating regional climate model performance over North America based on the NCEP Reanalysis II-driven runs.
• Comparing historical and future climate periods (2041-2070 vs 1971-2000) based on the model timeslice experiments.

Strengths

• Simulations are run at a high spatial resolution of 50 kilometers.
• Covers two distinct time periods: a historical baseline (1971-2000) and a future projection (2041-2070).
• Includes an ensemble approach using multiple regional climate models (RCMs) and global models (AOGCMs).
• Geographic domain covers the conterminous United States and most of Canada.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to nasa_earthdata, focusing primarily on North America.

Provenance

Source

North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP), hosted on NASA Earthdata.

Collection Method

Climate simulations produced by an international program running regional climate models (RCMs) nested within atmosphere-ocean general circulation models (AOGCMs).

Time Range

Historical: 1971-2000; Future: 2041 2070; Evaluation: 1979-2004.

Freshness

Last updated 2070-12-31 23:59:59.999000; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Conterminous United States and most of Canada.