Climate:

An understanding of the current climate and past trends of the region or a locality are vital to the analysis of potential futures. Also important is the understanding of the science underlying the creation of the various models used to project future change. This section will allow the user to learn some of the basics of climate science, explore historical climate observations in the region, evaluate internationally accepted climate models for the region, and see the future projections of these models in the region under specific greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

The Climate Change Primer provides basic information about the global climate system, including general information on the variables that affect that the global energy balance and the use of these variables in developing scenarios and models for projecting future trends in climate.

Observations allows the exploration of visualizations of 50-100 year historical climate patterns based on the records of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Historical Climate Network of 114 observation stations in the Mid-Atlantic Region. Averages and extremes in temperature and precipitation are presented.

Future Scenarios contains background information and sources of scenarios used in the modeling of future climate. Scenarios are plausible futures containing global conditions of population, technology, economic growth, emissions and other factors. The use of the scenarios and the associated assumptions and the effect on the certainty of climate modeling are discussed in this section.

Future climate projections are created by using climate models forced by future scenarios of greenhouse gas concentrations.  CARA investigations use seven commonly used global climate models.

Climate Models - Choose the scale at which you would like to explore model simulations of past and current climate (with observations) as well as future climate projections for the stations within the CARA region.

Station
State
Watershed
Region