This presentation by Dr. John Abatzoglou, University of Idaho, was provided at the April 17 workshop for the "Integrated Scenarios of the Future Northwest Environment" project, an effort to understand and predict the effects of climate change on the Northwest's fish, wildlife, hydrology, and ecosystem services. The project was funded by the NW Climate Science Center and the Climate Impacts Research Consortium.
This project integrates, for the first time, state-of-the-science predictive modeling of these different attributes of the future environment in the Northwest, and will provide coherence and guidance for many scientific studies seeking to work out the details of how climate change will affect various plant and animal species and other aspects of ecosystem services. This project has evaluated and downscaled global climate models (from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5), examined projections from these models and also from regional climate models, and improved and applied hydrologic and vegetation models.
