Computation of information for Environmental Management from the Results of Regional Climate Model Simulations

Regional Climate Models (RCM’s) have recently been developed and they have provided results which downscale the results of General Circulation Models. CLIME is one project, which exploits these results in further modeling and development of support tools for environmental management. This paper concentrates on computing weather patterns and “climate migration” from the results of the RCM’s for inclusion in the CLIME Decision Support System (DSS). The computational process is based on mathematical definitions of a weather pattern and climate. The prevalence of weather patterns and their spatial extent was studied using tabulating and spatial visualizations. The results have been incorporated into a web-based tool as interactive visualizations. The results reinforce the impression that for the IPCC scenario A2, under which emissions are high, the climate change is predicted to be stronger. The results also show that, at least using the selected discretization, the climate at one location is often dominated by only a few weather patterns. According to the results the predicted future climate is in some cases very similar to current climate at some other geographical location. This climate migration analysis is implemented as an interactive visualization in the CLIME DSS. It is argued that if an environmental DSS includes application tools, e.g., for what-if analyses, it should also include tools, with which the user can improve his/her knowledge and, subsequently, comprehension on the relevant issues. Interactive visualization is an example of such a tool.