U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

This site offers 13 recorded presentations from the 29 July–2 August, 2013 offering of the Climate Variability and Change Virtual Course (CVCVC). This five-day live facilitated online course provided an extensive background on a range of climate variability and change topics with an emphasis on developing communication skills for challenging climate topics. The topics covered in this course, while aimed primarily at NOAA operational climate services delivery staff will also be helpful for others who already possess a basic level of understanding of climate science.

This module contains five activities designed for students in grades 5 to 8 to help them understand sea level using real data. Teachers can use any of the five modules developed to explore dynamic Earth processes and understand the impact of environmental events on a regional or global scale.

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.

This module describes the process of selecting the best available climate projection information and using it to develop “climate-adjusted weather” inputs to be used for modeling climate change impacts. These modeled impacts can be used for planning of future water resources. Specific steps of this process include: (1) recognizing the general science and terms associated with Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs); (2) making AOGCMs more regionally applicable through bias correction and downscaling; (3) determining climate change scenarios based on climate projections and selecting specific projections to inform each scenario; and (4) developing climate-adjusted weather inputs associated with each climate change scenario.

This module explains how climate models work. Because the modeling of both weather and climate share some similarities, the content throughout this module compares and contrasts the two, explaining how and why climate models differ from weather models. The module discusses how models are built to simulate climate and generate the statistics that describe it, and concludes with a discussion of how models are tuned and tested.

This module looks at how increasing temperatures due to climate change have affected sea level rise and what effects scientists expect in the future, given rising greenhouse gas emissions. The various mechanisms of sea level rise are discussed, as well as the tools and research used to study this topic. The module also discusses how countries and communities are preparing for future increases in sea levels

This module is an overview of the different effects climate change produces in different regions of the United States. In addition to discussing impacts already being experienced, the module presents information on how climate scientists use specialized models and statistical techniques to estimate how regional climates are likely to change in the future.

This module discusses global climate change and the role of increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities. It also covers signs of climate change, how scientists study climate, scientists’ current thinking on future changes, and what can be done to minimize the effects.

The module presents statistical evidence that demonstrates the impact that climate variability has on weather, explains predictability on time scales from weeks to month and seasons in the future, and the probabilistic nature of climate variability impact on daily weather predictions.

This module discusses how a changing climate can lead to changes in extreme weather events on the local scale. The role of natural variability is also explained. The module describes how climate change can have both positive and negative effects, depending on the situation, location, and the vulnerability of the population. While research on the relationships between climate change and extreme events is still relatively new, the module discusses what changes scientists think are likely to happen if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.