Climate twins - An attempt to quantify climatological similarities

Abstract

As climate change appears, strategies and actions will be necessary to cope with its effects on environment and society in the coming decades. Current climate conditions can be observed everywhere in the world but future climate conditions can only be estimated through climate simulations which produce huge amounts of quantitative data. This data leads to statements like "temperature increase is expected to exceed 2.6°C" or similar and remain fuzzy to non-experts in climate research. The Climate Twins application is designed to communicate climate changes in an intuitive and understandable way by showing regions which have now similar climate conditions according to a given Point of Interest (POI) in the future. This paper explains how the application seeks for locations with similar climatological patterns according to the POI. To achieve this goal a method has been developed to quantify similarity between two locations' climate data. © 2011 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.