Abstract
An easily accessible climate data portal, http://yorku.ca/ocdp, was developed and officially launched in 2018 to disseminate a super ensemble of high-resolution regional climate change projections for the province of Ontario, Canada. The spatial resolution is ~10 km × ~10 km and temporal resolution is one day, UTC. The data covers 120 years from 1981 to 2100. This user-friendly portal provides users with thousands of static and interactive maps, decadal variation trend lines, summary tables, reports and terabytes of bias-corrected downscaled data. The data portal was generated with an emphasis on interactive visualization of climate change information for researchers and the public to understand to what extent climate could change locally under different emission scenarios in the future. This paper presents an introduction to the portal structure and functions, the large extent of the datasets available and the data development methodology.
Highlights
The impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale
We developed a super ensemble and high resolution (~10 km × ~10 km) regional climate projections for Ontario based on all available and creditable data sources at the time this study occurred; the source data for the supper ensemble covers the entire Province of Ontario and are generated by credible developers using methods published in peer-reviewed journals
The statistics of changes are based on the sub ensemble of each of the four Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) respectively; the maps for 38 climate indices are plotted and presented in the same manner as for the four basic variables
Summary
Governments and enterprises are making plans to mitigate and adapt to the changing climate. It has become critically important for researchers and policy makers to have easy access to climate change information at the right spatial and temporal scales for their studies and practices. In addition to our data, some other limited data sources available for climate change projections for the Province of Ontario, Canada, are used to develop the latest version of the data portal. Considering climate data/projections are one of the critical inputs for any climate change related risk/vulnerability assessment, the development of the user-friendly Ontario Climate Data Portal (OCDP) with the robust Ontario-specific data would better support practitioners’ climate change related risk/vulnerability assessments
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