Projected changes in future climate over the Midwest and Great Lakes region using downscaled CMIP5 ensembles

Abstract

Despite an increasing body of evidence that climate change is having a significant impact on different types of biogeophysical systems in the Midwest and Great Lakes region, there still remain critical questions of how quickly and how much climate will be altered over this region in the future. This study provides future daily temperature and precipitation at high resolution (1/16°) which can be used in many regional impact assessments, and also analyses the projected mean and extreme climate events.

Indiana’s Past & Future Climate: A Report from the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment

“…These scenarios follow Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) 4.5 and 8.5 4 , respectively, which have been used to develop many previous projections summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. See Hamlet et al (in review) and Byun and Hamlet (2018) for further details on the future climate analysis.…”

Indiana ’s Agriculture in a Changing Climate: A Report from the Indiana Climate Change Impacts Assessment

“…Future climate projections in this report are based on an ensemble average of six global climate models for mid-century (2041 to 2070) and late-century (2071 to 2100) (see Byun and Hamlet (2018) and Hamlet et al (in review) for details). Two future scenarios of greenhouse gas concentrations are considered -"medium" and "high. "…”

Evidence of an extreme weather‐induced phenological mismatch and a local extirpation of the endangered Karner blue butterfly

“…Extreme weather events—occurrence of weather or climate variation above (or below) a threshold value, typically 5 or 1% of the upper (or lower) distribution of a the region's historically observed climatic range—are compounding the consequences of mean temperature change (Seneviratne et al, ). Heatwaves, droughts, heavy precipitation, flooding, and periods of unseasonal temperatures have been increasing in recent years and will continue to grow in number and intensity as climate change proceeds (Byun & Hamlet, ; Planton, Déqué, Chauvin, & Terray, ; Ummenhofer & Meehl, ). In 2012, for example, many regions across northeast and Midwestern North America experienced an especially early spring warm up followed by severe summer drought (Ault et al, ; Mallya, Zhao, Song, Niyogi, & Govindaraju, ).…”