Developing a Block-by-Block Understanding of the Impacts of Climate Change

The best models of the impacts of climate change have been devoted to understanding global, or even national, changes. But NASA has devoted significant computational resources to projecting future climate conditions at the neighborhood level.

1 minute read

September 30, 2013, 7:00 AM PDT

By Jonathan Nettler @nettsj


"[N]ew NASA projections that take climate change to a more fine grained understanding," reports Ben Schiller. "Instead of the normal hifalutin picture, these images get down to the block-by-block. They show how Monowi, Nebraska, and Baneberry, Tennessee, are going to experience global warming, not whole continents or even countries or states."

"Climate projections normally deal in scales of 100 to 250 kilometers," explains Schiller. "NASA's new images are of the order of half a mile, or 800 meters. They're the product of past measurements, geographical readings, and a host of greenhouse gas data, all processed over 'hundreds of thousands of supercomputing hours.'"

“'The NEX-DCP30 dataset provides a higher resolution that will be of great reference to the decision-making of natural resource managers, urban planners and the climate change science community,' said Ramakrishna Nemani, senior Earth science researcher at Ames, and a co-author on the study. Details and availability of the new dataset were published in Eos, Transactions American Geophysical Union on Sept.10."

Friday, September 27, 2013 in Fast Company Co.Exist

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