How will climate change impact your hometown? Discover the future climate of your city with a new interactive tool from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
Climate change is having an impact across the world. How will it change how your hometown feels? An interactive web application from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (UMCES) now allows users to see how their local climate is expected to change. This innovative tool matches the expected future climate of each city with the current climate of another location, providing a relatable picture of what is likely in store.
Utilizing data-driven projections, the tool matches the future climate of 40,581 places and 5,323 metro areas worldwide with the current climate of another familiar location, offering a relatable picture of what lies ahead. For those in Washington, D.C., for instance, expect your summers to resemble those in northern Louisiana by 2080.
Similarly, if you reside in Shanghai, China, you would need to travel to northern Pakistan to get a sense of what Shanghai’s climate could be like in 2080.
“In 50 years, the northern hemisphere cities to the north are going to become much more like cities to the south. Everything is moving towards the equator in terms of the climate that’s coming for you,” Matthew Fitzpatrick, associate director for research and professor at UMCES, said in a news release. “And the closer you get to the equator there are fewer and fewer good matches for climates in places like Central America, south Florida, and northern Africa. There is no place on earth representative of what those places they will be like in the future.”
Fitzpatrick, a spatial ecologist, employed climate-analog mapping — a statistical technique that matches the expected future climate at one location with the current climate of another familiar location — to provide a place-based understanding of climate change. Using the latest data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), he illustrated anticipated temperature changes over 30 years under two different scenarios.
The web application provides results for both high and reduced emissions scenarios, as well as several different climate forecast models. Users can map the best matches for their city for these different scenarios and models and also map the similarity between their city’s future climate and present climates everywhere (based on the average of five forecasts for each emission scenario).
The first scenario assumes very high greenhouse gas emissions, on track to warm the planet by around 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of this century, making the earth warmer than it has likely been in millions of years. The second scenario is aligned with the Paris Climate Accord goals, projecting the planet warms by about 3 degrees Fahrenheit by immediately and drastically reducing human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
“I hope that it continues to inform the conversation about climate change. I hope it helps people better understand the magnitude of the impacts and why scientists are so concerned,” added Fitzpatrick.
Explore the interactive climate map for your city at UMCES Future Urban Climates. Discover how your hometown’s future climate will make it feel like somewhere else.