The Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative (CLCC) has just announced the release of downscaled climate data projections (through 2099) for Puerto Rico. This is a valuable resource, which will allow scientists from many fields to evaluate climate change impacts in their respective fields.
The data have the following characteristics:
Projections of daily maximum and minimum temperature and twenty-four hour cumulative precipitation for over 200 long-term weather stations throughout the region for the period 1960-2099 based on Global Climate Models (GCMs) from the Third Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP3) used for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR4 IPCC).
Projection datasets are available for three greenhouse gas emission scenarios: high (A2), medium (A1B), and low (B1). The global model output for precipitation and temperature were downscaled to local station locations by Hayhoe (2013): 71 stations for precipitation, 29 stations for maximum temperatures (Tmax) and 27 stations for minimum temperatures (Tmin).
Download the downscaled precipitation and temperature data here. (After loading website, click on Geospatial Data.)
Today a new weather station was installed in the Finca Alzamora, UPRM campus, Mayaguez Puerto Rico. Data from the weather station are available from two websites: WeatherLink or WeatherUnderground. The WeatherUnderground site allows you to download archived data in a coma delimited text format that can be imported into Excel. Data being collected include: air temperature, dew point temperature, RH, wind speed and direction, solar radiation, UV index, soil moisture tension and soil temperature. A value of the reference evapotranspiration is available on the WeatherLink page. We are still working out a few kinks, but should have it running smoothly within a few days.
The weather station was purchased with funds from the UPRM NOAA CREST Project.
Good article on the possibility of climate change-induced famine: Click Here We in Puerto Rico should be very concerned about famine in other parts of the world, since 80% of our food is imported.
This is the first episode of a series on climate change produced by ShowTime. Excellent!
P.S. PR friends: The evangelical climate scientist, Katherine Hayhoe, interviewed in this episode, provided the global climate data used in a recently published study on seasonal impacts of climate change on ag water resources in Puerto Rico. Click here to download
Click Here to view the video series.
PRAGWATER 