VEMAP 2: U.S. Daily Climate Change Projections, 1994-2100

VEMAP Phase 2 provides daily transient climate change scenarios from January 1994 to approximately 2100, derived from two major atmosphere-ocean general circulation models. The dataset contains seven variables—total incident solar radiation, minimum and maximum temperature, vapor pressure, precipitation, relative humidity, and mean daily irradiance—designed to be concatenated with historical data to form a continuous series from 1895. Its primary purpose is to compare time-dependent ecological responses of biogeochemical and biogeographical models across the conterminous United States.

Use Cases

• Projecting ecosystem model responses based on daily climate variables like temperature and precipitation.
• Analyzing long-term climate trends and decadal variability patterns, such as ENSO, from transient model experiments.
• Driving coupled biogeochemical-biogeographical models with historical and future climate forcings.
• Conducting a U.S. National Assessment of climate change impacts on vegetation and ecosystems.

Strengths

• Provides a continuous daily climate series from 1895 to ~2100 when combined with the VEMAP 2 historical dataset.
• Scenarios are derived from two established AOGCM models (CCC and HADCM2) and include key variables for ecosystem modeling.
• Explicitly designed to capture both long-term trends and multi-year to decadal climate variability.

Limitations

• Critical metadata is missing or conflicting: row count, file size, and specific column names are not provided on any platform.
• License is ambiguously listed as 'other-license-specified', requiring users to confer with the NCAR VEMAP Data Group for proper use.
• Dataset freshness is unclear; the 'last updated' date of 2026 appears to be a future placeholder, not a genuine timestamp.

Provenance

Source

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) VEMAP Data Group, with data accessed via the Climate Impacts LINK Project, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia.

Collection Method

Derived from transient greenhouse gas experiments with sulfate aerosols from the Canadian Climate Center (CCC) and the Hadley Centre (HADCM2) AOGCMs.

Time Range

1994 to approximately 2100 (designed to extend historical data from 1895).

Freshness

2026-04-12 17:56:37.506577 (Note: This appears to be a future/placeholder date, not a genuine update)

Geography

Conterminous United States.