Around
the world, including
Ontario, the effects of climate
change have already been upon us. It is important that Ontario
continues to acquire and enhance
knowledge and scientific expertise on the effects of climate change in
the
province in order to provide the best possible information to policy
makers for
the development of sound, responsible and effective climate change
adaptation
strategies. Currently, there is a need to refine climate change impacts
modelling
down to a regional level in order to understand its direct and
longer-term
effect on local communities.
General
circulation models (“GCM(s)”) are models
which numerically simulate changes in climate at a global scale,
however, these
models can only provide information at a horizontal resolution of
hundreds of
kilometers which is too coarse to resolve variables of interest to a
scale
necessary for planning purposes (i.e. at the district/county level).
Downscaling is a method for obtaining high-resolution climate or
climate change
information from the relatively coarse-resolution GCM results. The
well-established Providing Regional Climates for Impacts Studies
(“PRECIS”)
is one model by using a
dynamic downscaling technique. This project will involve the dynamical
downscaling (by using PRECIS) of GCM modelling outputs at
district/county
scales over Ontario,
as well as, trends of these variables.
A new downscaling technique based on stepwise cluster analysis was developed in this study. It was then applied to downscale the climate change variables from the PRECIS 25 kilometer model results to higher resolution outputs of 10 kilometer. Based on the outputs, this study summarizes the
post-analyses of horizontal distributions of long-term means of 20 climate variables for future projections over Ontario and, trends for years 2010-2099 at twelve locations and seven regions.
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