There is an urgent need for a detailed understanding of the future climate on our planet. To address these needs, a group of DOE-funded scientists recently produced a set of high-resolution scenarios that span a range of plausible changes in U.S. climate over the 21st century. This approach is called thermodynamic global warming (TGW).
The study spans a wide range of future warming possibilities and are designed to show how the events of the previous 40 years (1980-2019) would “replay” under warmer conditions. Each documented event replays eight times in the simulations (once in each of the two 40-year future periods for each of the four scenarios).
Jennie Rice, who is a senior researcher at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, explains that the TGW simulations indicate potential increases in extreme event intensity, geographic scope, and durations, including how previously non-extreme events could become extreme under a warmer future.
According to Andrew Jones, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist, events captured in the simulations include every type of extreme experienced over the 40 year historic period-droughts, storms, dry wind events that increase the risk of wildfire, and compound events in which multiple extremes occur simultaneously. The TGW data sets are publicly available.
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-climate-simulation-insights-earth-future.html