The Ontario Climate Data Portal, a user-friendly portal of Ontario-specific climate projections

Abstract

An easily accessible climate data portal, http://yorku.ca/ocdp, was developed and officially launched in 2018 to disseminate a super ensemble of high-resolution regional climate change projections for the province of Ontario, Canada. The spatial resolution is ~10 km × ~10 km and temporal resolution is one day, UTC. The data covers 120 years from 1981 to 2100. This user-friendly portal provides users with thousands of static and interactive maps, decadal variation trend lines, summary tables, reports and terabytes of bias-corrected downscaled data. The data portal was generated with an emphasis on interactive visualization of climate change information for researchers and the public to understand to what extent climate could change locally under different emission scenarios in the future. This paper presents an introduction to the portal structure and functions, the large extent of the datasets available and the data development methodology.