High-Resolution Climate Projections for the Northeastern United States Using Dynamical Downscaling at Convection-Permitting Scales

Abstract

To paraphrase former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, “All climate change is local”—that is, society reacts most immediately to changes in local weather such as regional heat waves and heavy rainstorms. Such phenomena are not well resolved by the current generation of coupled climate models. Here it is shown that dynamical downscaling of climate reanalyses using a high-resolution regional model can reproduce both the means and extremes of temperature and precipitation as observed in the well-measured northeastern United States. Given this result, the downscaling is applied to climate projections for the middle and end of the 21st century under Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5 as well as for the historical time period to help assess regional climate impacts in the northeastern United States. The resulting high-resolution projections are intended to support regional sustainability studies for the northeastern United States and are made publicly available.