Changes over Time
Understanding how and why our environment is changing over time is an important element to ensuring our ability to mitigate and adapt to those changes. Understanding the potential impact of change helps us decide how to manage our resources in a way that ensures our natural environment can continue to provide the goods and services on which we as a society depend. To this end, EnviroAtlas provides past and future projections for a subset of variables to investigate historical change and project future change.
What We Provide
Conterminous U.S. | Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Gaum, and Northern Mariana Islands
Continental 48 States U.S.: Climate Projections out to 2099 & Historical Climate Data 1950 - 2005
The NASA Earth Exchange (NEX) scientific collaboration platform has made available downscaled CMIP5 climate projections for the continental 48 States with a spatial grid resolution of 800 meters. The EnviroAtlas team has converted these large complex files into a geospatial format and has made them available through the EnviroAtlas Interactive Map Timeseries tool that includes four future scenarios, four climate variables (minimum temperature, maximum temperature, precipitation, and evapotranspiration) at four seasons (fall, winter, spring, summer and annual).
Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Gaum, and Northern Mariana Islands: Changes from recent history to end-of-century
The projections for outside the continental 48 States are based on NASA Earth Exchange-Global Daily Downscaled Projections (NEX-GDDP), developed using Global Climate Models (GCMs) runs conducted under the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) with a spatial grid resolution of 25 kilometers. The NEX-GDDP-CMIP6 data was processed to calculate projected changes, converted into a geospatial format and is available through the EnviroAtlas Interactive Map Timeseries tool as a change between five 30-year periods:
- recent history (1976-2005) to near-term future (2025-2054)
- recent history (1976-2005) to mid-century (2045-2074)
- recent history (1976-2005) to end-of-century (2070-2099)
- near-term future (2025-2054) to mid-century (2045 to 2074)
- near-term future (2025-2054) to end-of-century (2070 to 2099)
Dataset includes that includes four future scenarios, four climate variables (minimum temperature, maximum temperature, precipitation, and evapotranspiration) and four seasons (fall, winter, spring, summer and annual). The ensemble mininum change is displayed in the map, but the ensemble medians and maximums of changes can be viewed in a popup by clicking on a feature in the map. Total precipitation and total potential evapotranspiration are also available as fractions in the web service or by downloading the data.