Chesapeake Bay Watershed and State of Maryland Climate Projections
These projections are PRELIMINARY. You must check back frequently to determine whether you have the most recent estimates.
They are based on freely available international modeling group coupled climate models, and were contributed for the IPCC AR4 report. Thanks to the PCMDI archive for serving the models and to University of East Anglia for climate data.
NEW
January 16, 2008
Methods: The best performing (based on global and local metrics) 20 models from the IPCC AR4 archive at PCMDI are averaged to yield a mean estimate for climate projections. Each model is averaged over the spatial area of the Chesapeake Bay watershed or the State of Maryland, then a seasonal climatology is generated from the period 1979-1999. This is subtracted from the model scenarios A2 and B1 to form anomalies. These anomalies and the full models are averaged together to form mean model and mean model anomaly time series. Our analysis of model error shows that the mean model has lower error than any single model. Statistics from these time series, including mean model mean and seasonal climatology are summarized in the excel files. 25th and 75th percentile range is shown for the individual models on the spreadsheets. Some climate variables have fewer than 20 models forming the mean model.
Variable of analysis
Each page includes a spreadsheet with data summary, and figures.