Climate is not projected to change uniformly—different ecological systems will experience different changes requiring tools to translate cutting-edge climate science into ecologically relevant information (U.S. Climate Change Science Program, 2008). Here, we provide an overview of the ClimateWizard (http://www.ClimateWizard.org ), a web-mapping tool, and demonstrate its utility for assessing projected temperature and precipitation change in 77 ecoregions of the contiguous United States, southern Canada and northern Mexico. The analysis was run for 16 general circulation models (GCMs) from the IPCC AR4 downscaled to a 1/8 degree resolution (~12 km, Maurer et al. 2007). All changes were analyzed relative to a 1961-1990 baseline average. Multi-model ensemble analysis was used to quantify climate model agreement, and rank ecoregions by degree of projected climate change.
Results/Conclusions
The analysis found that under the IPCC A2 emissions scenario the mean annual temperature during 2070-2099 is projected to change the greatest in northern Midwest United States, and southern Canadian ecoregions. The Central United States Tallgrass Prairie ecoregion was projected to increase the greatest by a majority of the climate models (median of GCMs, 4.8 ºC). While temperature is projected to increase in all ecoregions by all GCMs, model agreement for precipitation change was found only in a few ecoregions, such as all models agreeing that precipitation will increase in the Boreal Shield, St. Lawrence-Champlain Valley, Northern Appalachian/Acadian and Canadian Rocky Mountains ecoregions. Similarly, 80% of GCMs agree that precipitation will decrease in the Chihuahuan desert ecoregion. Only limited results could be presented here, however, the real power of the ClimateWizard lays its ability to visualize and explore the complete results at the interactive mapping website, http://www.ClimateWizard.org.
