The University of Toronto Climate Downscaling Workflow (UTCDW) is a
+ resource designed to teach users how to produce their own
+ statistically downscaled climate projections for the purpose of
+ climate change impact analysis. The target audience includes graduate
+ students and practitioners in engineering, the physical, mathematical,
+ and computational sciences, who are interested in how their subject of
+ study is sensitive to climate change. The main component of the UTCDW
+ is a
+
Important natural and human-designed systems are sensitive to
+ weather and climate conditions, and are therefore also sensitive to
+ the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Experts in these fields
+ need to assess climate change risks, but unprocessed climate model
+ output such as those from the CMIP6
+ (
Other educational materials on climate change impact assessment are
+ available, but they are either limited regarding the complexity of the
+ methods
+ (
The UTCDW Guidebook consists of six chapters. The first four
+ chapters introduce the reader the background knowledge required to
+ perform downscaling. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, and guides
+ users in configuring their Python environment. Chapter 2 explains how
+ climate change projections are made and what their limitations are.
+ Chapter 3 demonstrates how to access observational, reanalysis, and
+ climate model data, and how to do exploratory analysis with
+ observational and raw climate model data. Chapter 4 contains
+ explanations of various methods of bias-correction and downscaling,
+ and examples of how to validate historical downscaled model output and
+ assess future projections. Python code for the downscaling methods is
+ provided, leveraging the utility of
The next two chapters focus on applying the content of Chapters + 1-4. Chapter 5 introduces the “Downscaling Workflow” part of the + UTCDW. This chapter unpacks the decisions that must be made when + designing a climate change impact study and breaks the analysis tasks + down into digestible steps. Chapter 6 contains examples of the + workflow. Each example demonstrates the process of stating a problem, + acquiring the necessary data, producing calibrated climate + projections, and quantifying uncertainty. The examples focus on + Canadian regions and observational data products, though we include + links to available observational and downscaled data products for + additional regions as well as global data. We welcome user submission + of additional worked examples to contribute to the gallery of examples + to be included on the website, or future versions of the UTCDW + Guidebook
+The UTCDW also includes a
+
The guidebook material has been used by students from three + cohorts: two undergraduate reading courses and two summer research + students. The progress of the students demonstrates the strength of + the Guidebook as a learning resource. They each started with little or + no background in climate science or Pangeo software, and by the end of + their terms they were able to independently conduct their own climate + change impact analysis projects. We also hosted a hackathon where 30 + participants used the Guidebook and workflow to tackle climate change + impact challenges related to irrigation water demand, snowfall, and + extreme heat. Most participants came to the event with little + experience working with climate data and left having successfully + implemented the downscaling workflow, further proving that Guidebooks + meets its purpose as a learning resource.
+We acknowledge Anson Cheung, Peikun Guo, Claire Pan, Cassandra
+ Chanen, and Lilian Chan for testing the UTCDW Guidebook content during
+ its development. We acknowledge funding from the University of
+ Toronto’s
+