1. Sources of Climate Information and the WB Climate Data Portal Michael I. Westphal CC Team ENV SDN Week 26/2/08

2.  What’s out there?  What data are easily accessible?  What data are useful and important in the development context? - timeframe, variables, spatial scale (Are GCMs too coarse?)  Is it all too uncertain? (Or the Paralysis of Uncertainty) Oft-heard Questions

3. Sources of Climate Information I.) Documents/ Reports  IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (www.ipcc.ch)  Limitations: - Informational only, no data - Generated by and for (?) climate scientists - Qualitative, difficult to bore down to regions - Most projections end of 21 st Century

4. II) Data Sites  IPCC Data Portal (WCRP CMIP3 multi- model database) (https://esg.llnl.gov:8443/) - abstruse (netCDF) format, unusable to development professionals

6. II) Data Sites  Various CRU historical datasets Tyndall: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~timm/data/index- table.html CGIAR: http://cru.csi.cgiar.org/CRU_data_structure.asp University of East Anglia http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/ -requires programming/GIS sophistication

7. II) Data Sites  WorldClim (www.worldclim.org) - Historical bioclim variables ands downscaling from 3 GCMs (IPCC 3AR) -no measures of extreme precipitation; rainfall variability -requires programming/GIS sophistication

9. III) Visualisation Sites  Hadley Centre -One model, one point in time, limited variables (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/ models/modeldata.html)  National Center for Atmospheric Research - More variables, more interactive but still one point in time - can download data - one model - missing variables to development? (rainfall variability, variability, variability) (www.gisclimatechange.org)

12. III) Visualisation Sites – Current/historical climate  International Research Institute for Climate and Society – climatologies, drought, anomalies, etc. (http://portal.iri.columbia.edu/portal/server.pt)  NOAA Africa Desk - climatologies, drought, anomalies, station data, etc. (http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/african_des k/)

15. IV) What about “desktop” models?  MAGICC (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/~mikeh/software/magicc. htm) -More for exploring emissions; only basic temp and SLR  PRECIS (Hadley Centre) - (http://precis.metoffice.com) - More for Met Bureaus -A typical experiment (100 x100 grid) run on a 2.8GHz machine: 4.5 months to complete a 30-year simulation!

16. … hence the need for a Climate Data Portal

17. Niche of our Climate Data Portal  ‘Light’ and quick, ease-of-use  Visualization, querying, data summarization  Pixel-level and country aggregation  More consonant with development timeframe and variables (extreme precipitation/ temperature) http://essdcharts.worldbank.org

18. Niche of our Climate Data Portal  Historical and Projected  GCMs and downscaling  Multimodel, model concordance/discordance (uncertainty)  Not just 1  Climate Data - Climate-related (natural disaster, crop yield projections) - Non-climate (socioeconomic)

19. Some Global Datasets TypeVariablesInstituteResolution Climate Change Projections (High resolution GCM) Temp, Precip, extreme rainfall metrics Meteorological Research Institute, Japan 20 km. Climate Change Projections (IPCC GCMs) Temp, Precip, extreme rainfall/temp metrics Various 1- 4° 1- 4° Climate Change Projections Runoff USGS (Milly et al. 2008) 2°2°2°2° Climate Change Projections Crop yield changes/ suitability (14 crops) IIASA, Austria 5’

20. TypeVariablesInstituteResolution Natural Disaster Hotspots Floods, droughts, landslides (economic loss, economic loss: GDP, mortality) WB/ Columbia University 2.5’ Historical Climate (CRU Dataset) Monthly Temp, Precip University of East Anglia/ CGIAR 0.5° Some Global Datasets

27. Planned Functionality Linkages with other tools, wiki Linkages with other tools, wiki Interfacing with Bank databases Interfacing with Bank databases Spatially-referenced Knowledgebase Spatially-referenced Knowledgebase

28. Acknowledgements Data suppliers: Data suppliers: - IPCC Data Portal (LLL) - MRI, Japan SDN IT Group SDN IT Group - Reza Firuzabadi - Arvind Gowda, Dany Jones, Michael Kane, Ritesh Sanan, Varuna Somaweera

29. Climate Needs for Bank? Variables Variables Spatial Scale Spatial Scale Time Frame Time Frame Display of uncertainties Display of uncertainties Format Format Will this portal be useful? When? Modifications, extensions? Will this portal be useful? When? Modifications, extensions?