Engineering Commons^™

Climate Scenarios For California, Edwin P. Maurer, Michael Dettinger, Daniel Cayan, Mary Tyree, Katherine Hayhoe, Celine Bonfils, Philip B. Duffy, Benjamin Santer

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering

Possible future climate changes in California are investigated from a varied set of climate change model simulations. These simulations, conducted by three state-of-the-art global climate models, provide trajectories from three greenhouse gas (GHG) emission scenarios. These scenarios and the resulting climate simulations are not “predictions,” but rather are a limited sample from among the many plausible pathways that may affect California’s climate. Future GHG concentrations are uncertain because they depend on future social, political, and technological pathways, and thus the IPCC has produced four “families” of emission scenarios. To explore some of these uncertainties, emissions scenarios A2 (a medium-high emissions) …