Want a better idea of your future climate? Try this map

Enlarge (credit: Alan Levine)

Absent a time machine, it's hard to truly wrap your head around what the future climate will be like. Climate projection numbers carry a lot of information, but those numbers can seem abstract-what does 2.5 warmer actually feel like?

One way to understand that information is to hop in the car (even if it's not a DeLorean). There are a huge variety of local climates around the world, and it's possible to find a location today that ought to feel a lot like your hometown will in a few decades. A new study by Matt Fitzpatrick and Rob Dunn applies this "climate analog" approach to 540 cities in the US and Canada-which means about 250 million people can use a Web map to look for an analog to their future climate.

Present and future climates

There are multiple ways you could imagine defining such a comparison. In this case, the researchers broke the data down by season, calculating minimum/maximum temperatures and total precipitation averaged over 1960-1990. This is basically the seasonal weather you're used to.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments