High Resolution Regional Climate Modelling in Support of Climate Change Adaptation in Ontario

September 6, 2018

Presented by:

• John Liu (Senior Science Advisor on Climate Change, Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks)

This presentation provided an opportunity for the audience to learn some fundamentals of climate change and climate modelling, and bring them up-to-date on what the Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks (MECP) has been doing on high resolution regional climate modelling in support of adaptation.

As many climate change adaptation practitioners know, due to the coarse resolution of global climate models (GCMs) they are unable to resolve local geophysical features at regional/local scales, such as the Great Lakes and the Niagara Escarpment which have significant impacts on Ontario’s local climate. However, most adaptation practices are implemented at the local/community scale and need climate information at higher resolution. To address this climate information gap, the Ontario government has refined the climate information from the global scale (i.e. 100’s of kilometers) down to local scales (i.e. 10’s of kilometers) using state-of-the-science downscaling techniques. Terabytes of Ontario-specific high resolution regional climate projections have been developed and disseminated via climate data portals which provide both intuitive visualization to all users (general public and policymakers) and extensive data downloading for scientists/engineers for their risk/vulnerability assessments. This webinar concluded with a brief live demonstration of the most up-to-date Ontario Climate Data Portal.