U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

This two-day instructor-led course offers a combination of lectures and hands-on exercises to give students a better understanding of coastal inundation issues and mapping methods using a geographic information system (GIS). This course has been designed to: understand the types of inundation; learn about products and terminology; access data; perform datum conversions; understand interpolation methods and create DEMS; explore water level data; and map inundation using GIS. In hands-on exercises, students connect to web map services, access elevation data, convert between vertical datums, create and manage digital elevation models, map inundation model output, develop inundation zones, and map sea level rise using modeled tidal surfaces.

These two videos serve as an introduction to the Downscaled Climate and Hydrology Projections website. This website, the result of a collaboration between several federal and non-federal partners, provides access to downscaled climate and hydrology projections for the contiguous United States and parts of Canada and Mexico, derived from contemporary global climate models. In the first video, a hydrologic engineer at the Bureau of Reclamation's Technical Service Center, in Denver, introduces the website and provides an overview of the MetEd lesson: Preparing Hydro-climate Inputs for Climate Change in Water Resources Planning. This lesson provides background information needed to use the projections site effectively to retrieve climate and hydrology projections data for impacts analysis. In the second video, another lecturer steps through the process of retrieving projections data using the website.