Important. Before using this climate information, you should read the information on this page to understand the purpose of these climate projections and their limitations. Further caveats and limitations are also provided.

Purpose

The purpose of this web-based tool is to support studies that need to consider the spread in projections of future climate change produced by different climate models under different emissions scenarios. It does not provide probabilistic projections of climate change.

Here are some examples of the potential applications of this information:

• Want a quick overview of climate change projections for a country you are interested in? You can easily see projections from different generations of climate models, compare with observed climate and even download the data too.
• Want to compare whether newer generations of climate models give different projections from older generations? Compare CMIP3 and CMIP5 projections.
• Have you read a study that relied on only one or two climate models to study future climate or its impacts in a particular country? Easily see where these model projections lie within the overall multi-model ensemble of projections, and whether they are representative or an outlier.
• Do you need to select a few climate models to use from the full multi-model ensemble? You can easily check which models to select that will adequately sample the ensemble spread for your country of interest.

Climate projections are only provided for national averages (except for a few very large countries which are split into sub-national regions. The only spatial patterns provided are for the observed climatology: these are included to highlight the amount of geographical climate variation that can occur in some countries (for countries with a large degree of geographical variation in their climate, national average climate changes should be used with caution).

Small countries (represented by less then twenty 0.5° latitude/longitude grid cells in CRU TS) are not currently included.

To access national average climate information, click the Locations link, select a region and then a country. The country name will appear in the menu at the left-hand side, select either the Observations or Projections link listed under the country name. See Welcome page for more navigation tips.

Contacts

There is no dedicated support available, but contact Tim Osborn if you have questions or find errors.

References

If you use the information provided here, please acknowledge its use and cite this reference:

• Osborn TJ, Wallace CJ, Harris IC and Melvin TM (2016) Pattern scaling using ClimGen: monthly-resolution future climate scenarios including changes in the variability of precipitation. Climatic Change 134, 353-369. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1509-9

A new paper describing these national-average climate projects is being prepared:

• Osborn et al. (in preparation) Exploring inter-model uncertainty in future climate projections at the national-average scale.

This web-based tool is based upon the ClimGen software application. More information about ClimGen can be found here:

• ClimGen webpage, giving details about the software, data and published papers that have used climate projections from ClimGen.
• Osborn TJ, Wallace CJ, Harris IC and Melvin TM (2016) Pattern scaling using ClimGen: monthly-resolution future climate scenarios including changes in the variability of precipitation. Climatic Change 134, 353-369. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1509-9

Acknowledgements

This web-based tool was developed with support from:

• UEA's NERC Impact Accelerator Account, 2014-15
• Belmont Forum / JPI-Climate INTEGRATE project (NERC grant number NE/P006809/1), 2016-2019

The development of ClimGen was supported by:

• EU HELIX project (grant number ENV.2013.6.1-3), 2013-2016
• EU ToPDAd project (grant number 308620-ENV.2012.6.1-3), 2012-2015
• NERC QUEST-GSI (Global Scale Impacts of Climate Change, grant number NE/E001831/1), 2007-2010
• Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (grant numbers IT1.16 and T2/11), 2001-2004

We acknowledge the following data sources:

• The modelling groups, the U.S. Department of Energy's Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI), the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) and the World Climate Research Programme's Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) for producing and making available the CMIP3 and CMIP5 output.
• The Met Office Hadley Centre for diagnosing patterns from their QUMP perturbed physical parameter model ensemble.