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Extreme Event Exposure Uncertainty in NA-CORDEX Projections

Presentation Date
Thursday, December 10, 2020 at 4:00am
Authors

Author

Abstract

Exposure to future extreme weather depends on changes in population and climate. Projections of climate depend on both changes in emissions, but also on the anthropogenic land-use changes (LUCs) that are likely to occur as population changes. The latter, however, are not considered in the standard, existing regional climate model (RCM) simulations produced for the North-American Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (NA-CORDEX). We have produced simulations that are complementary to the NA-CORDEX simulations, but that include future projections of urban and agricultural LUC that are consistent with particular Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and related to a specific Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP). This allows us to examine the uncertainty across projections of extreme event exposure on different populations accounted for in simulations that do or do not include the effect of those populations on the climate via the different LUCs associated with the different societal pathways under the different SSPs. Specifically, in this presentation, we will focus on population exposure to extremes in heat and rainfall at the end of the 21st century using RCM simulations produced with WRF under SSP3+RCP8.5 and SSP5+RCP8.5.

Funding Program Area(s)