Future climate: Projected average

Abstract

This chapter describes possible climate changes projected to evolve during the twentyfirst century for the Southwest United States, as compared to recent historical climate. It focuses on how climate change might affect longer-term aspects of the climate in the Southwest and is closely related to Chapter 7, which is concerned with the implications of climate change on shorter period phenomena, especially extreme events. The projections derive from the outcomes of several global climate models, and associated "downscaled" regional climate simulations, using two emissions scenarios ("A2" or "high-emissions," and "B1" or "low-emissions") developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES; Nakićenović and Swart 2000).