Northern Great Plains Response to Global Warming: Posted March 2, 2024

This is about the U.S. National Climate Assessment Program and in particular the Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment which you can access HERE.

It is a long report and one part of the report is chapters on different regions of the U.S. Last week I participated in a video Zoom session related to Chapter 25: the Northern Great Plains. So in this article, I will talk first about the National Climate Assessment (NCA) Program and then what I learned at the video session with the working group for the Northern Great Plains. After the discussion of the overall program, I will be using the slides presented at that session which are mostly from the National Climate Assessment report. I am using their slides because they presumable presented the slides that were of most interest to them and of course, there was only one hour for the session so that limits what can be presented. If you do not like looking at slides without audio, you can access the Zoom session that was held HERE.

Introduction

This is important. Each Regional Chapter is organized around five topics and you will see them in this presentation.

Please click on “Read More” to access the discussion concerning the Northern Great Plains Region. It is presented in the form of responses to five key messages from the NCA5 Report.

The rating system is the same as used in the AR5 IPCC Report.

This exhibit is a bit extreme in my opinion. 4C is not in the cards at least not anytime soon. The main takeaway is where in the Region it is likely to get warmer faster.

This was pretty interesting. I personally would discount the RCP8.5 scenario in favor of the RCP 4.5 Scenario. Loses in soil moisture are important.

This was the most interesting graphic to me. Blue is good, Red is bad. They said that the projection for the Upper Mississippi Watershed would not continue with the improvement if I heard them correctly.