One of the ways scientists measure climate change is by following the earth's average temperature rise.
But Dr. Rao Kotamarthi, a senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, says, ''It's not going to be warming everywhere by two degrees; precipitation is not going to change everywhere by X percent; not every place is going to be a drought; some of them will actually get wetter."
Kotamarthi is one of the developers of the Climate Risk and Resilience Portal. It's an online resource that makes projections of future climate impacts. And, with the help of supercomputers, the portal has divided the country into squares just seven-and-a-half miles wide. It means you can look at the climate change impacts on Fryeburg and see how they differ from Portland, or Bangor, or Eagle Lake.
Kotamarthi says he first realized the importance of such local information a decade ago. He was part of a group of researchers who assessed infrastructure vulnerabilities in Portland Harbor and Casco Bay, which serves as a regional hub for shipping, along with other impacts on energy and the water cycle.
Kotamarthi says the goal is to make this information useful, not just to government agencies, but individuals for use in their homes and businesses, "Converting this risk factor into something an engineer can understand, a community can understand, is a challenge for us. And, I think this is the first few steps in trying to convert this into more useful information."
The Argonne National Lab, Federal Emergency Management Agency and AT&T collaborated on creation of the Climate Risk and Resilience Portal, which went online last November. For now, it provides information on likely temperature increases, related heating degree day measurements, precipitation, and wind speeds.
Kotamarthi says they will eventually add data on sea level rise.