Climate change projections of the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Program (NARCCAP)

• DOI: 10.1007/s10584-013-0831-3
• Publication Date: 2013-07-27T01:34:41Z
• Authors: L. O. Mearns; S. Sain; L. R. Leung; M. S. Bukovsky; S. McGinnis; S. Biner; D. Caya; R. W. Arritt; W. Gutowski; E. Takle; M. Snyder; R. G. Jones; A. M. B. Nunes; S. Tucker; D. Herzmann; L. McDaniel; L. Sloan
• Keywords: Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment; Atmospheric Science; Global and Planetary Change; 550; Agronomy and Crop Sciences; 13. Climate action; Climate; 551; 01 natural sciences; 0105 earth and related environmental sciences

We investigate major results of the NARCCAP multiple regional climate model (RCM) experiments driven by multiple global climate models (GCMs) regarding climate change for seasonal temperature and precipitation over North America. We focus on two major questions: How do the RCM simulated climate changes differ from those of the parent GCMs and thus affect our perception of climate change over North America, and how important are the relative contributions of RCMs and GCMs to the uncertainty (variance explained) for different seasons and variables? The RCMs tend to produce stronger climate changes for precipitation: larger increases in the northern part of the domain in winter and greater decreases across a swath of the central part in summer, compared to the four GCMs