National Climate Assessment Research Articles

Research to Confront Climate Change Complexity: Intersectionality, Integration, and Innovative Governance.

Climate impacts increasingly unfold in interlinked systems of people, nature, and infrastructure. The cascading consequences are revealing sometimes surprising connections across sectors and regions, and prospects for climate responses also depend on complex, difficult-to-understand interactions. In this commentary, we build on the innovations of the United States Fifth National Climate Assessment to suggest a framework for understanding and responding to complex climate challenges. This approach involves: (a) integration of disciplines and expertise to understand how intersectionality shapes complex climate impacts and the wide-ranging effects of climate responses, (b) collaborations among diverse knowledge holders to improve responses and better encompass intersectionality, and (c) sustained experimentation with and learning about governance approaches capable of handling the complexity of climate change. Together, these three pillars underscore that usability of climate-relevant knowledge requires transdisciplinary coordination of research and practice. We outline actionable steps for climate research to incorporate intersectionality, integration, and innovative governance, as is increasingly necessary for confronting climate complexity and sustaining equitable, ideally vibrant climate futures.

Books and Other Reviews

Key Points Scientists react to the US Fifth National Climate Assessment — Richard Wenning and Glenn Suter Defending biodiversity in the courtroom — Richard J. Wenning We look forward to the seasons each year, except one — Richard J. Wenning Roads and the environment — Glenn Suter Artificial intelligence is remaking our world — Robert Stevenson

Fifth National Climate Assessment Reveals Urgent Action Needed to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions

The Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) was released in November 2023 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. The Assessment evaluates the impacts of a changing climate across 10 US regions and a wide range of biodiversity and other interests, including water, forests and ecosystems, coasts and oceans, agriculture and rural communities, the built environment, energy and transportation, health and air quality, and economic and social systems. The Assessment is the fifth such report released by the US government since 2000, using science‐based data by more than a dozen US agencies and approximately 750 scientists tracking the impacts of climate change, and peer‐reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM).1 The details outlined within the Assessment are not optimistic. In fact, the extensively peer‐reviewed report further quantifies the need to take immediate actions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere. Immediate actions will require both increased mitigation measures to reduce GHG emissions and adaptation measures as we attempt to live with the impacts of a changing climate.

Public Awareness of Major Climate Change Reports and Potential Political Connections

Climate change will affect all life. Sociologists contribute to major climate change reports and are interested in how people are engaging these documents. Major climate change reports coming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Climate Assessment are used by scientists, policy makers, and localities to assess climate vulnerability and create climate action plans. Although sociologists have been at the forefront of understanding climate change perception, there is limited understanding about how the public interacts with these reports or whether they are even aware of them. The author uses survey data ( n = 1,013) to assess public awareness of these reports. The results suggest that conservative think tanks may be doing a better job at marketing reports to advance their agendas. This is important information as scientists continue to think about how to reach the public to advance mitigation and adaptation efforts and counter climate denialism.

Fifth National Climate Assessment Released

Fifth National Climate Assessment Released

Availability of state-level climate change projection resources for use in site-level risk assessment

In recent years, incorporating climate change considerations has become an important focus of organizations’ resilience planning and risk assessment efforts, including United States federal agencies. This has led to an increasing demand for higher-resolution and higher-quality climate projection information that is easy to understand for non-expert users. In particular, there is a demand for information about how climate change may affect high-impact, low-frequency (HILF) hazards that are central to risk assessments focused on infrastructure. While national-level resources like the National Climate Assessment provide information on climate impacts for different sectors and regions in the United States, downscaled information with location-specific context is often required for site-level resilience planning. As higher-resolution and higher-quality climate resources continue to be developed at the state level, it is imperative to understand ongoing and planned efforts, as well as key drivers for developing these state-level resources. Based primarily on stakeholder input from climate experts from 31 states, we identify key state-level climate resources, as well as drivers accelerating the development of these resources. We assess the availability of climate change resources, specifically those with information about HILF events that have been developed at the state level and can support users in conducting site-level resilience planning. We identify three key drivers or predictors for the development of climate change resources at the state level: (1) existence of state laws, mandates, Executive Orders, and other state policies, (2) existence of university partnerships; and (3) the makeup of the stakeholder groups (in terms of dominant discipline/expertise) participating in the effort. The diverse state strategies and resources surveyed in this study could support the incorporation of higher-resolution climate information into site-level planning.

Soil moisture at 30 m from multiple satellite datasets fused by random forest

As a key variable used to characterize the climate process between the land surface and atmosphere, the surface soil moisture (SM) plays an irreplaceable role in the fields of hydrology, meteorology and agriculture. However, the relatively coarse spatial resolution of SM products currently limit the application in water resource management at the field scale. In this study, we proposed a high-spatial-resolution SM retrieval framework based on the random forest algorithm (RF-SM) to integrate in situ SM dataset from in the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN), Landsat 8 optical and thermal observations, soil properties from SoilGrids V2.0, meteorological variables from the fifth generation of the European ReAnalysis (ERA5) dataset and four coarse-scale SM products including the Soil Moisture Active/Passive (SMAP), the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI) and U.S. National Climate Assessment Land Data Assimilation System (NCA-LDAS). Compared to three other machine learning (ML) algorithms [extremely randomized trees (Extra-Trees), gradient boosting regression tree (GBRT) and extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost)], the random forest (RF) algorithm exhibited the best performance against a subset of 100 validation sites with a Kling–Gupta efficiency (KGE) of 0.69 and root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of 0.063 m3/m3. In terms of different land cover types and typical sites, RF-SM also showed a better accuracy than any of the individual SM product. Finally, the retrieval framework was applied to map the 30-m resolution SM spatial distributions in five substudy areas in the U.S. The results suggest that it is feasible to retrieve accurate SM at a 30-m spatial resolution from multiple satellite datasets based on the RF algorithm, which has important practical significance for agricultural drought monitoring at the field scale.

Does choice of outdoor heat metric affect heat-related epidemiologic analyses in the US Medicare population?

We calculated daily maximum, minimum, and mean outdoor air temperature (T), heat index (HI), wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), and Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) for populous US counties and linked estimates with daily all-cause mortality and heat-related hospitalizations among Medicare beneficiaries (2006-2016). We fit distributed-lag nonlinear models for each metric and compared relative risks (RRs) at the 99th percentile. Across all heat metrics, extreme heat was statistically significantly associated with elevated risks of morbidity and mortality. Associations were more pronounced for maximum daily values versus the corresponding minimum for the same metric. The starkest example was between HImax (RR = 1.14; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.12, 1.15) and HImin (RR = 1.10; 95% CI = 1.09, 1.11) for hospitalizations. When comparing RRs across heat metrics, we found no statistically significant differences within the minimum and maximum heat values (i.e., no significant differences between Tmax/HImax/WBGTmax/UTCImax or between Tmin/HImin/WBGTmin/UTCImin). We found similar relationships across the National Climate Assessment regions. Among Medicare beneficiaries in populous US counties, daily maximum and mean values of outdoor heat are associated with greater RRs of heat-related morbidity and all-cause mortality versus minimum values of the same metric. The choice of heat metric (e.g., temperature versus HI) does not appear to substantively affect risk calculations in this population.

Alaska Terrestrial and Marine Climate Trends, 1957–2021

Abstract Some of the largest climatic changes in the Arctic have been observed in Alaska and the surrounding marginal seas. Near-surface air temperature (T2m), precipitation (P), snowfall, and sea ice changes have been previously documented, often in disparate studies. Here, we provide an updated, long-term trend analysis (1957–2021; n = 65 years) of such parameters in ERA5, NOAA U.S. Climate Gridded Dataset (NClimGrid), NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Alaska climate division, and composite sea ice products preceding the upcoming Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) and other near-future climate reports. In the past half century, annual T2m has broadly increased across Alaska, and during winter, spring, and autumn on the North Slope and North Panhandle (T2m > 0.50°C decade−1). Precipitation has also increased across climate divisions and appears strongly interrelated with temperature–sea ice feedbacks on the North Slope, specifically with increased (decreased) open water (sea ice extent). Snowfall equivalent (SFE) has decreased in autumn and spring, perhaps aligned with a regime transition of snow to rain, while winter SFE has broadly increased across the state. Sea ice decline and melt-season lengthening also have a pronounced signal around Alaska, with the largest trends in these parameters found in the Beaufort Sea. Alaska’s climatic changes are also placed in context against regional and contiguous U.S. air temperature trends and show ∼50% greater warming in Alaska relative to the lower-48 states. Alaska T2m increases also exceed those of any contiguous U.S. subregion, positioning Alaska at the forefront of U.S. climate warming. Significance Statement This study produces an updated, long-term trend analysis (1957–2021) of key Alaska climate parameters, including air temperature, precipitation (including snowfall equivalent), and sea ice, to inform upcoming climate assessment reports, including the Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) scheduled for publication in 2023. Key findings include widespread annual and seasonal warming with increased precipitation across much of the state. Winter snowfall has broadly increased, but spring and autumn snowfalls have decreased as rainfall increased. Autumn warming and precipitation increases over the North Slope, in particular, appear related to decreased sea ice coverage in the Beaufort Sea and Chukchi Seas. These trends may result from interrelated processes that accelerate Alaska climate changes relative to those of the contiguous United States.

The role of climate change and urban development on compound dry-hot extremes across US cities

Compound dry-hot extreme (CDHE) events pose greater risks to the environment, society, and human health than their univariate counterparts. Here, we project decadal-length changes in the frequency and duration of CDHE events for major U.S. cities during the 21st century. Using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model coupled to an urban canopy parameterization, we find a considerable increase in the frequency and duration of future CDHE events across all U.S. major cities under the compound effect of high-intensity GHG- and urban development-induced warming. Our results indicate that while GHG-induced warming is the primary driver of the increased frequency and duration of CDHE events, urban development amplifies this effect and should not be neglected. Furthermore, We show that the highest frequency amplification of major CDHE events is expected for U.S. cities across the Great Plains South, Southwest, and the southern part of the Northwest National Climate Assessment regions.

Biases in wind speed measurements due to anemometer changes

This research presents a case study of the biases and discontinuities that were introduced in observed long-term mean wind-speed and gust data-series due to anemometer changes in a meteorological station in northern Spain, operated by the Spanish State Meteorological Agency: San Sebastian-Igueldo. Field and wind-tunnel experiments with predefined conditions have been presented in the literature, however this research uses a real case study to assess the impact of anemometer changes on wind speed measurements due to three factors being: (i) the 3-cup anemometer model (SEAC vs. THIES companies); (ii) sensor height (∼19.95 m vs. ∼20.45 m) and (iii) sensor age (20-years old vs. new). Our results show (a) substantial biases in the measured wind speed and daily peak wind gusts, with the new THIES anemometer reporting stronger surface winds than the old SEAC anemometer; (b) opposing biases under weak (negative) and moderate-strong (positive) winds; and (c) significant breakpoints in the long-term wind data-series, which highlight the importance of data homogenization. National Weather Services and climate assessment groups will benefit from these findings since errors in wind speed and gust measurements can be minimized by implementing systematic observation protocols. Robust anemometer observations provide a basis for accurate quantification of the magnitude of changes and the variability of surface winds.

Charting a path for the National Nature Assessment

It's not every day that you get the opportunity to influence a major federal-level assessment from its inception; however, now is just such an occasion. A new evaluation of the state of nature in the US – the first National Nature Assessment (NNA) – is in its early formative stages and you are invited to help shape it. The NNA is one of several efforts being advanced by the Biden-Harris Administration to know, grow, and account for nature – in clear recognition of nature's significance to (among other Administration priorities) the fight against climate change. Nature affects almost every aspect of our lives and means something different to each of us. Even those reading this journal hold diverse views of nature, influenced by our backgrounds and cultures; our personal experiences and communities; our different ways of knowing; and our work across ecosystem types and levels of biological, ecological, and social organization. We've seen the value of including a wide range of perspectives and disciplines in research efforts, reports, and scientific assessments, including in ESA's own products. And we know that overlooking diverse views when considering policy and management decisions can create unnecessary trade-offs, marginalize groups of people, or fail to recognize the full spectrum of roles that nature plays. We need a comprehensive understanding of nature, an assessment enriched by braiding together the stories, scientific findings, Indigenous knowledge, and lived experiences of people from across the US. The NNA is an opportunity to integrate and assess information – from multiple sources and through a diversity of voices – to help gauge what nature means to different people, and to explore the future of the nation's great natural treasures. Launched in 2022 by the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and expected to be completed in 2026, the first-ever NNA aims to explore the many aspects of nature and its connections to issues facing those residing in the US today. Taking stock of the full abundance of our nation's lands, waters, and wildlife and the myriad ways that ecosystems affect US communities, the assessment will investigate how nature interacts with the economy, climate mitigation and adaptation, social equity, public health, and national security. It will allow us to consider what the future may hold, and what options we have for investing in nature as a core part of achieving societal aspirations. The USGCRP is taking initial steps to outline the NNA development process, with much of the scope and details of the assessment still to be determined. The developers will draw on lessons from previous assessments to ensure that the NNA is both useful and usable. For example, a major strength of the National Climate Assessment – now in its fifth cycle (https://www.globalchange.gov/nca5) – is its diverse author team: contributors from across the US with a wide range of expertise work together to create a credible, authoritative source of information on climate change. The National Climate Assessment also has broad salience and relevance, in part due to its multiple opportunities for engagement with and participation beyond the federal government. Building on experiences like these, and given the increasingly stronger calls from the research community for co-production, we aim to conduct the NNA in close collaboration with potential users and to broaden the types of knowledge considered, particularly those ways of knowing that have historically been repressed or overlooked. This process has just begun. We invite you to help shape it and ensure strong, diverse, relevant content. You can start by telling us: What questions should the NNA answer? What needs should it fill? How can we ensure strong collaboration with users and incorporate diverse ways of knowing nature? What form should the final product(s) take to be most accessible and useful to you, your community, and the government? Read more about this Request for Information (https://www.globalchange.gov/content/request-information-framing-national-nature-assessment) and submit your ideas to https://contribute.globalchange.gov through March 31, 2023. Comment is free and open to anyone from anywhere, including other countries. Beyond this initial collaboration on framing the assessment, there will be multiple opportunities to engage with the NNA throughout its development. The NNA is an opportunity to create a new picture of nature in the US – one that reflects the depth and diversity of ways people know, care about, and act on changes in nature. Your input and expertise matter. By design, our collective success depends on your engagement. Please join us in charting a new path for National Nature Assessments.

Representation of Atmospheric Water Budget and Uncertainty Quantification of Future Changes in CMIP6 for the Seven U.S. National Climate Assessment Regions

Abstract Observation-based climate model evaluation and future projections help policymakers in developing action plans for efficient management of water resources and mitigation of the impacts of hazardous extremes. Apart from this socioeconomic importance, the scientific value cannot be overstated, especially in light of the upcoming Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA) report. In this study, we evaluate the realism of hydroclimate variability in the historical simulations of a suite of coupled general circulation models (CGCMs) participating in the fifth and sixth phases of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5 and CMIP6). Our results demonstrate systematic biases in the simulated seasonal precipitation—most prominently, wet bias over the mountainous western United States in winter, and dry bias over the U.S. central plains in summer. A distinctive feature of this work is our focus on the examination of the atmospheric water budget, in particular the relative importance of remote and local contributions—convergence of moisture fluxes and local land surface processes (evapotranspiration) respectively—in helping produce precipitation. This diagnosis reveals that the leading contribution of the remote influence in winter is overestimated by the CMIP6 multimodel mean (MMM), whereas the local influence, which is more influential in summer, is underestimated. Our results aid in understanding the drivers of seasonal precipitation over the United States, where precipitation will likely increase by the end of the century but with significant model disagreement for the summer and fall. In support of ongoing NCA efforts, our study aims to contribute a comprehensive, regional-level analysis of the moisture budget and emphasizes the importance of realistically simulating its major components in CGCMs.

Seasonal variability of future extreme precipitation and associated trends across the Contiguous U.S.

Global climate models and long-term observational records point to the intensification of extreme precipitation due to global warming. Such intensification has direct implications for worsening floods and damage to life and property. This study investigates the projected trends (2015–2100) in precipitation climatology and daily extremes using Community Earth System Model Version 2 large ensemble (CESM2-LE) simulations at regional and seasonal scales. Specifically, future extreme precipitation is examined in National Climate Assessment (NCA) regions over the Contiguous United States using SSP3-7.0 (Shared Socioeconomic Pathway). Extreme precipitation is analyzed in terms of daily maximum precipitation and simple daily intensity index (SDII) using Mann-Kendall (5% significance level) and Theil-Sen (TS) regression. The most substantial increases occur in the highest precipitation values (95th) during summer and winter clustered in the Midwest and Northeast, respectively, according to long-term extreme trends evaluated in quantiles (i.e., 25, 50, 75, and 95th). Seasonal climatology projections suggest wetting and drying patterns, with wetting in spring and winter in the eastern areas and drying during summer in the Midwest. Lower quantiles in the central U.S. are expected to remain unchanged, transitioning to wetting patterns in the fall due to heavier precipitation. Winter positive trends (at a 5% significance level) are most prevalent in the Northeast and Southeast, with an overall ensemble agreement on such trends. In spring, these trends are predominantly found in the Midwest. In the Northeast and Northern Great Plains, the intensity index shows a consistent wetting pattern in spring, winter, and summer, whereas a drying pattern is projected in the Midwest during summer. Normalized regional changes are a function of indices, quantiles, and seasons. Specifically, seasonal accumulations present larger changes (~30% and above) in summer and lower changes (< ~20%) in winter in the Southern Great Plains and the Southwestern U.S. Examining projections of extreme precipitation change across distinct quantiles provides insights into the projected variability of regional precipitation regimes over the coming decades.

New Assessment Methods of Future Conditions for Main Vulnerabilities and Risks from Climate Change

The US National Climate Assessment, published in 2018, states that “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities” [...]

Toward Coequality of the Social Sciences in the National Climate Assessment.

Integration of the social sciences into climate assessments enhances report content and actionable science. The literature has identified the benefits and challenges in achieving coequal intellectual partnerships between the social and biogeophysical sciences in climate research. Less has been written on how to rectify the issue in the particular institutional context of a climate assessment. This article uses qualitative research methods to analyze social science integration in the United States' Fourth National Climate Assessment. It presents findings from focus groups held with social science-and nonsocial science-trained report authors. It finds that knowledge governance, or the formal and informal mechanisms shaping how information is produced and used, and cultural worldviews about the role of social sciences in assessments and assessments in society, affected social science integration. Report authors' principal orientation toward the social sciences was as a means of achieving what they saw as the assessment's public function, namely, to support education, decision-making, and action. Author expertise, report framing, and knowledge systems were other key themes that emerged. Based on this analysis, we propose potential pathways toward coequal intellectual partnerships in assessments by expanding the diversity of chapter teams' expertise, enhancing connections between authors and society, reconsidering report framing, and broadening inclusion of knowledge systems. We also discuss the potential role of applying social science theories and methods throughout the report life cycle from framing and engagement to evaluation.

Water AND Heat: Intervening in Adaptation Hazard Bias

After centuries of adapting to coastal living, increases in stormwater and tidal flooding events, along with projected sea level rise, led Charleston, South Carolina, USA to define flooding as an existential threat to the city. With billions of planned flood management projects underway, and additional billions of federal disaster flood recovery funds allocated to the State of South Carolina, the Governor's office established a South Carolina Office of Resilience in September 2020, with a focus on water management. The City of Charleston developed its own Flooding and Sea Level Rise Strategy. Simultaneously, the fourth National Climate Assessment pointed to heat health risks and projected costs of lost labor productivity concentrated in the Southeast, yet local recognition of heat as an equivalent threat to flooding was not apparent. Although Charleston's All Hazards Vulnerability Assessment included extreme heat as a significant hazard, without a group focused on heat, ongoing work in the city continued to prioritize water management as annual flood events rapidly escalated. This narrow adaptation framing was further solidified as funding focused on flood recovery and adaptation and technical experts worked within water-related boundaries. These interacting forces led to Hazard Bias, an inherent organizational process of reinforcing focus on a single hazard in the context of compound, complex hazard risks. To adapt to increasing heat, Charleston will need to raise compound risk awareness and adjust its capital investments in resilience to be inclusive of heat mitigation and adaptation as well as water. Yet in 2020 Charleston lacked basic urban heat data, technical expertise, and a strong source of motivation to develop a prioritization approach for recognizing multiple risks and complementary adaptation opportunities in those investments. Recognizing the inherent bias, a new coalition of heat researchers, practitioners, and health experts launched a tripartite heat-health research program and spurred the development of a new heat network in Charleston. The network reduced hazard bias by raising heat-health risk awareness and by intervening in adaptation planning to broaden water-only considerations to be inclusive of water AND heat. This paper provides a detailed case study how the intersections of multiple networks, messengers, and messages contributed to broadening the local resilience agenda from a “hazard bias” and how the lessons learned during this transformative process further reveal health inequities.

The Role of Cooling Centers in Protecting Vulnerable Individuals from Extreme Heat.

The Role of Cooling Centers in Protecting Vulnerable Individuals from Extreme Heat.

Large-scale citizen science programs can support ecological and climate change assessments

Large-scale citizen science programs have the potential to support national climate and ecosystem assessments by providing data useful in estimating both status and trends in key phenomena. In this study, we demonstrate how opportunistic, unbalanced observations of biological phenomena contributed through a national-scale citizen science program can be used to (a) identify and evaluate candidate biotic climate change indicators and (b) generate yearly estimates of status of selected indicators. Using observations of plant phenology contributed to Nature’s Notebook, the USA National Phenology Network’s citizen science program, we demonstrate a procedure for identifying biotic indicators as well as several approaches leveraging these opportunistically-sampled data points to generate yearly status measures. Because the period of record for this dataset is relatively short and inconsistently sampled (13 yr), we focus on estimates of status, though over time, these measurements could be leveraged to also estimate trends. We first applied various spatial, seasonal, and biological criteria to narrow down the list of candidate indicators. We then constructed latitude-elevation models for individual species-phenophase events using all observations. This allowed us to visualize differences between predicted and reported phenophase onset dates in a year as anomalies, with the expectation that these anomalies—representing earlier or later activity in the species of interest—reflect plant response to local springtime temperatures. Plotting yearly anomalies revealed regions with geographic coherence as well as outliers. We also show how yearly anomaly values can be reduced to a single measure to characterize the early or late nature of phenological activity in a particular year. Finally, we demonstrate how the latitude-elevation models can be leveraged to characterize the pace at which phenological transitions occur along latitude gradients on a year-by-year basis.

From Climate Model Output to Actionable Climate Information in Norway

The Norwegian Centre for Climate Services (NCCS) has developed a production chain for climate information with the aim of delivering a knowledge base for climate change adaptation suitable for use by planners at various administrative levels in Norway. This process consists of two main steps: First, climate and hydrological projections are produced at a local scale (1 × 1 km resolution) using available results from global and regional climate models (GCMs and RCMs). In a second step, climate factsheets with abridged information relevant for individual counties in Norway have been co-produced with users and county authorities. Projections were produced by using a climate–hydrological modeling chain driven by downscaled simulations from 10 GCM–RCM combinations and two climate scenarios in which temperature and precipitation were first downscaled and bias-adjusted to a 1 × 1 km resolution. Bias-adjustment was necessary, partly due to biases in the RCMs. These results were published in the Norwegian climate assessment report “Climate in Norway 2100.” The results have then been disseminated through various formats, such as reports, dataportals, visualizations and factsheets (available at https://klimaservicesenter.no/). NCCS has issued climate factsheets for 17 counties in Norway and Svalbard. The county-wise climate factsheets have become the most extensive product issued by NCCS. A challenge when developing information about climate change for use in adaptation is the issue of uncertainty, and the trade-off between robustness vs. precision in the numerical values given should guide the dissemination of climate information. Based on our experiences, we also recommend that climate information is developed in collaboration with users because this ensures that it will be understood by a wider audience. Most climate-related challenges for infrastructure are related to extreme events. For technical applications in Norway, climate change allowances are now available for heavy precipitation, floods, and storm surges as a tool for design analyses of buildings and infrastructure. This paper describes the production chain for the presently available climate projections following the release of IPCC AR5 (CMIP5), our experiences of the dissemination process, as well as our plans for further development of the next national climate assessment report based on IPCC AR6 (CMIP6).