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Aparna Bamzai-Dodson, USGS, presented on the Climate Scenarios Toolbox (now renamed to the Climate Futures Toolbox!), an open-source tool that helps users formulate future climate scenarios for adaption planning. Scenario planning is a way to consider the range of possible outcomes by using projections based on climate data to develop usually 3-5 plausible divergent future scenarios (ex: hot and dry; moderately hot with no precipitation change; and warm and wet). Resource managers and scientists can use these scenarios to help predict the effects of climate change and attempt to select appropriate adaptation strategies. However, climate projection data can be difficult to work with in areas of discovery, access, and usage, involving multiple global climate model repositories, downscaling techniques, and file formats. The Climate Futures Toolbox aims to take the pain out of working with climate data.
The creators of the Toolbox wanted a way to make working with climate data easier by lowering the barrier to entry, automating common tasks, and reducing the potential for errors. The Climate Futures Toolbox uses a seamless R code workflow to ingest historic and projected climate data and generate summary statistics and customizable graphics. Users are able to contribute open code to the Toolbox as well, building on its existing capabilities and empowering a larger user community. The Climate Futures Toolbox was created in collaboration with University of Colorado-Boulder's Earth Lab, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service.
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