Are We Getting Warmer? - See for yourself

Yes, it’s true – you can use climate data in ArcGIS Pro and see for yourself what the world’s climate scientists and their models have to say about where you live.

Thus, we are pleased to announce and invite you to try a new Learn.ArcGIS.com lesson called Explore Future Climate Projections.

Esri partnered with the UCAR|NCAR Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) to produce this lesson. An important part of the RAL’s mission is research that contributes to the fundamental understanding of the atmosphere the transference of that knowledge for the betterment of life on Earth.

In the lesson, we introduce and show how to get started working with climate data in ArcGIS Pro. You will learn how to use baseline data for historical climate conditions and explore data representing scenarios for possible future climates.

This lesson represents the newest thinking for climate models. Instead of data for a single climate model, UCAR|NCAR recommended a multi-model ensemble (MME).  This MME is a global collection of data representing the mean and standard deviation of ten select climate models. The MME contains global temperature and precipitation variables for historical and sixteen possible future climate scenarios. Learn more about the MME.

The lesson shows how to use raster functions and the raster function editor to compare the present location of the Mediterranean climate zone, as defined in the Köppen climate classification, to one scenario for its projected future location.

This lesson is especially useful for educators of and students in introductory climatology, meteorology, physical geography, and environmental science courses. This lesson could be assigned as homework or a class exercise to learn more about using climate data, working with NetCDF data, and using raster functions. The complete collection of NetCDF files for the MME are included with the lesson, which means it to be adapted to explore any of the other scenarios.

Please comment or email me with any questions regarding the lesson.

About the author

Charlie Frye

I am Chief Cartographer at Esri, and manage the Cartographic Projects Group on the Content Team. I have been with Esri in Software Products since 1994. I am currently the author of Esri's Ecological Land Unit services, global ecological content, and the World Population Estimate Services. Contact me at cfrye@esri.com with questions or feedback.

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