Virtual tool depicts climate change scenarios for the Basque country

What will be the temperature in your neighbourhood in 2100? See the projections.

Climate change is one of the most urgent and complex environmental challenges of our lifetimes and we must give it our full attention, recognizes the Basque Country's Climate Change Strategy, Klima2050. The strategic document sets the objective of ensuring the resilience of the Spanish autonomous community in the years ahead. In order to do this properly, it needs relevant and what is more - open data.

Visualizing climate change

The Strategy adopted by the Basque Government foresees the need to anticipate the risks of climate change, through innovation, improvement and knowledge transfer. That is why IHOBE (Public Society of Environmental Management of the Basque Government) has developed a tool allowing for the visualization of different scenarios for the climate transformation in Euskadi.

The regional climate scenarios constitute a reference and cross-sectional information for future studies of the impact of climate change on the various sectors, such as health, agriculture, water resources, the natural environment, etc. They aim to help identify the best adaptation measures to climate change.

The models have conveniently been summarized into an online tool which allows testing climate change scenarios from different time perspectives – historical (1971-2000), near future (2011-2040), medium future (2041-2070) and distant future (2071-2100). The visual tool is freely accessible and will certainly be of use to public administrations, researchers and ordinary citizens.

Analysing climate change and its impact

Global circulation models (GCM-General Circulation Models) are the main tools for the analysis of climate change and its impact on different socio-economic sectors. The scenarios, offered in the form of a map at high spatial resolution (1 km x 1km), are available until 2100 with daily data. They take into account variables such as temperature and precipitation.

Finally, visitors can analyse and extract information by searching in one of 17 specific areas – municipality, neighbourhood, agricultural areas, etc. Time data series are available for download by year or by season, either in annual averages or daily data.

So, if you are curious to see how the Basque country’s temperature is expected to change over time (hint: it goes into dark red), make sure to check out the tool.