New website makes California climate change science available to all

Ann Brody Guy in the UC Berkeley News Center: Extensive climate change research being conducted at California universities and research centers is now openly available through a public website developed at the University of California, Berkeley. The announcement was made today (Tuesday, June 7) by the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the California Natural Resources Agency, the sponsoring state agencies.

The website, Cal-Adapt.org, went live today and has a variety of features tailored for different types of users, including members of the general public concerned about their neighborhood or region; decision-makers, such as city planners and resource managers; and experts who want to examine data.

The information on the website comes from peer-reviewed climate change research funded by the CEC’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program, which funds and oversees the Cal-Adapt website project. The site displays the research data in a variety of climate change-related scenarios and in map format, modeling various projections – such as changes in snow pack, wildfire danger and temperature – through the end of the century.

“PIER-funded projects have produced enormous amounts of data and findings related to climate change and its impact on California, but until now the data from the research has been inaccessible to a larger audience,” said Kevin Koy, manager of the Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF), the state-of-the-art mapping and geo-location center at UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, where the Cal-Adapt website was developed. Koy is co-author, with the GIF team, of an article on the development of Cal-Adapt.org published earlier this week in the journal Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing.

Koy said that Cal-Adapt is primarily a planning tool intended to benefit local climate adaption efforts, and is also designed for use by the general public. To explore climate projections, users can search specific California locations or click on an interactive map….

The Cal-Adapt website displays projected temperature changes in area of California, including Lake Tahoe (from the UC Berkeley website)