Climate Change Impact

Part 1. Background

Summary

It is widely accepted that the climate is changing, and will change more in the future, as a result of human activity. I have carried out many studies where I have quantified the impact of changes to climate. These have been in Europe, Asia, the Pacific and Africa. This posting is an introduction. Other postings will examine specific studies.

Introduction

There is widespread acceptance the climate is changing and that humans are driving, at last part of, the change. As a consequence, it is normal for infrastructure projects to examine the potential impact of climate change and then adjust the design to take account of it. This involves developing a quantified timeline of the changes.

So, in this and a series of following posts I am going to describe how to quantify the impact of climate change based on my experience in many parts of the world: Europe, Asia, the Pacific and Africa.

The purpose of these posts is two-fold:

Firstly, to pass on my experience to others who are required to quantify climate change.
Secondly, and unashamedly, to advertise my skills and experience.

This post is introductory. Following posts will be more detailed and specific.

Impact of Climate Change

NASA lists the projected impacts of climate change[1] as:

Change will continue through this century and beyond
Temperatures will continue to rise
Frost-free season (and growing season) will lengthen
Changes in precipitation patterns
More droughts and heat waves
Hurricanes will become stronger and more intense
Sea level will rise 1-4 feet [0.3 to 1.2 m] by 2100

I have examined all these types of impact – and a few more.

Climate Models

A climate model represents the earth as a series of cells (or boxes).

These cells are of the order of 100 km by 150 km horizontally and have around ten levels of atmosphere and a similar number of levels of the ocean.
The models simulate the interaction between each of the model cells about once every hour.
The execution time of climate models is of the order of 1 minute of computer simulation for one day of simulation. Typically, a model will simulate the climate for a period of more than 200 years and the execution time will be a few months.

The above figures are a generalisation for global climate models and individual models will have different values for the above parameters. In particular, regional models, which on represent part of the earth’s area, will have a finer grid.

Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs)

The whole purpose of climate models is to calculate the changes in climate due to human activity and if these are found to have negative consequences, to evaluate mitigation options. The changes in human activity can lead to an energy imbalance – with more energy being absorbed by the earth than is radiated back into space. The best-known factor is the production of Carbon Dioxide, which allows more energy in to the earth’s atmosphere than out of it, but others include the effect of soot particles in the atmosphere and changes to the reflection of radiation.

Exactly what humans will do to the atmosphere in the coming century is unknowable so four possible trends have been considered. These are known as Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). They are labelled by the associated energy imbalance in watts per square metre at the end of this century: RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP 8.5. The first of these would occur if humans severely curtailed their emission of greenhouse gases. The last of the four assumes a future with little or any limitation of emissions.

The use of RCP values was introduced in 2013. Before that the equivalent was SRES (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios) values. Some of the studies I worked on used SRES values.

Downscaling

As stated above, global climate models work at a grid size of the order of 100 km side. (The phrase ‘of the order of’ is used as there is variety of scales between different models.) However, it is sometimes necessary to consider areas that are smaller than this, for example a specific length of proposed road. Going from a model cell to the specific area is known as ‘downscaling’. In theory, there are two methods: dynamic and statistical. However, the ‘dynamic method’ effectively requires a climate model with a reduced grid size developed for a specific study which in all but a few cases is impracticable.

The alternative, known as the ‘statistical’ method or the ‘delta method’, assumes that the changes in climate projected for a model cell apply uniformly over the whole cell. For example, assume that a model cell projects a temperature increase of 2°C but that the observed temperature within the area of the cell is from 9°C to 15°C. The projection will be that that in all locations the increase will be 2°C.

This method places reliance on observed climate data. Source of such data will be discussed later.

Source of climate projections

For climate projections, I use almost exclusively the Climate Explorer site (https://climexp.knmi.nl) run by the Netherland’s Meteorological Service. The only exception has been in a few cases when ‘pre-digested’ projections were provided by the client.

Use of the web site is free and if you sign up it facilitates use by ‘remembering’ your previous selections.

In terms of projections I use mostly two sets of projections:

Monthly CMIP5 scenario runs
Annual CMIP5 extremes

The acronym ‘CMIP5’ refers to the ‘Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project Phase 5’.

The ‘scenario runs’ part of the site has output from climate models under four groups: Surface variables, Radiation variables, Ocean, Ice & Upper Air variables, and Emissions. In most cases for impact analysis it is the variables in the first group that are important. These include temperature and precipitation.

The ‘extremes’ part of the site has a second set of projections. These were developed by the Expert Team on Climate Change Detection and Indices (ETCCDI). Values are provided for 31 variables. These include maximum daily precipitation, number of frost days (when the minimum was zero or below), number of ice days (when the maximum was zero or below) and growing season length.

Selection of climate projections

The climate explorer site has projections for more than 20 climate models. In addition, some models are run for multiple ‘experiments’ in which slightly different but credible model parameters are used. So, which one to use?

In some cases, there might be guidance on the choice of climate models, for example from previous studies. Often however a decision has to be made on which models to use. What I have often done is to compare the simulated climate model output with observed values. This is rarely simple. For example how do you choose between a model which is biased (with values consistently higher or lower than observed) but which represent the inter-annual variation with a different model which is less biased but does not represent annual variations?

Sources of observed climate data

The best source, if available, is from the meteorological and hydrological services in the country you are working in. For various reasons that is not always possible. Sometimes, for example, the meteorological service requires payment which the project has no funds for. Other sources of data include:

The Climate Explorer site (https://climexp.knmi.nl) mentioned above. This has monthly data on precipitation and temperature.
The National Climatic Data Center (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets). This site has daily data on precipitation and temperature.
The Climatic Research Unit (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/data). This has a range of data including monthly temperature and average values of several meteorological variables on a 10’ grid.