Producing Actionable Climate Science for Impacts and Adaptation to Climate Change
The Regional Integrated Science Collective (RISC) produces high-quality, regional-scale scenarios for projected climate change and analysis of current and future climates.
RISC produces and curates output from multiple regional climate simulations and makes the scenarios widely available to the community of stakeholders and scientists interested in climate impacts, such as infrastructure, transportation, water resource managers, health, ecology, and agricultural researchers.
RISC manages archives of multi-model regional climate model (RCM) simulations, creates value-added data products such as visualizations and bias-corrections from them, and serves this information to the community. Scenario creation includes future estimates of greenhouse gas emissions and land-use cover change.
Other RISC work includes developing tools and methods for analysis of this data, as well as producing analyses and providing guidance for climate scenario use that meets the needs of multiple user communities. This work is underpinned by interactions with stakeholders, non-climate specialist scientists, and users of the scenario data to co-produce knowledge about climate impacts.
RISC staff participate in a wide variety of analysis projects, many dedicated to establishing the differential credibility and evaluating the uncertainty of climate model simulations and methods of producing climate scenario data. The goal of this work is to produce scientific results that are useful, usable, and actionable for adaptation to climate change. Particular areas of focus include snow, wildfire, process-based evaluation, downscaling and bias-correction, and various regional analyses of current and future climate over North America.
Many of RISC’s efforts involve collaboration with other climate scientists, impacts researchers, and stakeholders in an effort to create more actionable research and applied convergence.