America
NASA scientist Ramakrishna Nemani reveals new global climate data
Washington, June 10
An Indian-American
scientist working with NASA has revealed how temperature and rainfall
patterns may change through the year 2100 because of growing
concentrations of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere.
New
high-resolution global climate data prepared by Ramakrishna Nemani,
project scientist at the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), a big-data research
platform in California, can be viewed on a daily timescale at the scale
of individual cities and towns.
It will help scientists and
planners conduct climate risk assessments to better understand local and
global effects of hazards, such as severe drought, floods, heat waves
and losses in agriculture productivity.
"This is a fundamental
dataset for climate research and assessment with a wide range of
applications," Nemani said in a statement.
"NASA continues to
produce valuable community-based data products on the NEX platform to
promote scientific collaboration, knowledge sharing, and research and
development," Nemani added.
The data shows projected changes
worldwide on a regional level in response to different scenarios of
increasing carbon dioxide simulated by 21 climate models.
"With
this new global dataset, people around the world have a valuable new
tool to use in planning how to cope with a warming planet," noted Ellen
Stofan, NASA chief scientist.
This NASA dataset integrates actual measurements from around the world with data from climate simulations.
These
climate simulations used the best physical models of the climate system
available to provide forecasts of what the global climate might look
like under different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios.
The NASA
climate projections provide a detailed view of future temperature and
precipitation patterns around the world at a 25-km resolution, covering
the time period from 1950 to 2100.
The 11-terabyte dataset provides daily estimates of maximum and minimum temperatures and precipitation over the entire globe.