Is there any climate simulator for the coming years? - eviltoast

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/7362179

I’m looking to see what coastal areas would be impacted, what regions would get above certain temperatures , etc, we all see sporadic invidual image of these predictions in articles online but I wonder if there’s a tool for that, ideally open source.

    • __@fedia.io
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      8 months ago

      Can’t speak for OP, but I was hoping there was a straightforward front end out there to play with variations on a theme - my own use case would be plotting the next 5-25 years. Something like “How many miles do I strictly need to move to have a reasonable chance of temps <= 80 F on all but the most brutal handful of August days?”

      Basically, I figure that at this point in life I’ve got 1-2 more short/medium-term moves in me at most, and zero desire to ever do it again after I retire (assuming that I can/do). For the lay crowd, there’s not really a way to flip through projections.

      Not averse to trying to come up with a way to do it in QGIS, just don’t want to reinvent the wheel if there’s a straightforward site out there already doing it.

      • gigachad@feddit.de
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        8 months ago

        Absolutely understandable. Maybe there is some easy tool around, but I see some potential problems.

        Questions such as “Is this zone habitable in 2035” or “Will this area be ocean in 2050” are extremely hard to answer with our current knowledge and available data. As you probably know, climate scientists speak of probabilities, as projections e.g.for temperature are highly uncertain, especially in the more far away future. If there is a tool answering such questions, you probably can’t trust it. Then, you will likely not get a one does it all tool, as the questions OP asked are highly specific. All in all the matter is very complex and there are no easy answer. You need some kind of motivation to gather a certain amount of background knowledge about the topic.

        I think what comes closest to what OP wants is downloading model results from largely accepted climate models such as CMIP6. They usually come in special file formats that can efficiently store geospatial time series, such as netCDF or HDF5. There are tools like Panoply where you can do some very nice visualisations. You do not need to code neither is the software very complex. QGIS and ArcGIS are overkill here, as you would not want to do spatial analysis but only visualize.

        The work you would need to do is 1) understanding what you want - there is not a single result, instead you have climate projections under several different scenarios, model assumptions, input data etc. You need to figure out what to choose. 2) Have a decent feeling of geospatial visualization techniques. Cartography is a complex field, and correctly visualizing data is pretty hard.

        I am sorry I cannot provide easy solution. WhatI can offer is helping to acquire data if you what you want and also I can give technical support on visualization software. Maybe also give you some guidelines on how to interpret a figure.