Regional climate projections

Abstract

When designing adaptation and mitigation measures of climate change for the coming decades and up to the middle of the century, policymakers and industries must rely upon climate information that is at an appropriate scale to evaluate impacts, vulnerabilities and risks due to changes in climate. It is, therefore, essential that the quantitative information on the climate and its impacts is reliable. Reliable quantitative information about climate change impacts must also be available. This includes estimations of uncertainty bounds. In the current state of knowledge, technology and structure of scientific communities, climate change impact studies are achieved from a suite of models: Global earth system models, with a generally low-resolution (100-300 km), regional limited-area climate models with a higher resolution (10-50 km), which take their boundary conditions from global models and impact models calculating how changes in weather, ocean and biogeochemical cycles affect the system to be adapted.