Break Out Session - Impacts

1) what level of pre-aggregation of data would be useful

• easy function to put data on common grid
• single common grid or gridding tool?
• certain quantities would be more common
• statistics that would feed into watershed modelling - daily precipitation in Table 1; weekly and 10-day aggregation
• Monthly means for some parameters and monthly totals for change field calculations
• seasonal? For some users
• multi-model average - issue is what is the averaging period ; issue is that you want to do the impacts assessment on the internally consistent model run
• pool of tools or functions to allow aggregate up to what you want because in the impacts field there are so many different applications
• space for user contributed tools or scripts
• aggregation - definition: logically grouping data
• policy perspective - aggregation by political boundaries (state and province, county?) - what do you want to get? e.g., state precipitation into future link to demographics - maybe this is where GIS tool would be useful
• clearing house where masks/shape files provided for regions such as BC, watersheds

2) what type of guidance material

• really important - county or state user - develop level of understanding so they can become more sophisticated
• online tutorial? The handout as an example
• standard for impacts people - description of models, structure, quality of data, recommendations for use, IPCC scenario group report, uncertainty of climate models
• think of the info brokers, climate intermediaries such as RISA as the client group what information do they need be able to access to engage other groups interested in climate but not the same level of sophistication
• conversion table from metric or imperial
• trend in temperature, precipitation (noisy)
• some kinds of diagnostics - faithfulness to regional patterns, trends? Seasonal t and p, uncertainty in models
• short text discussion of verification for example to go with some of the graphics demonstrating verification - pattern recognition, how does it do for ENSO
• uncertainty products - climate model results such as simulated precipitation and its error bars
• error in seasonal precip. across the models
• place to post comments on data sets - errors found
• how to select climate data - caveats in using climate data

3) what other tools

See below

4) what observational data sets would you like

• purpose to do own verification
• NCEP reanalysis input
• good climatology T and P since using delta approach - so use appropriately - gridded data sets
• driving runs from GCM

5) what other tools and functionality on new ESG site what:

1. Output format
   • display of model output - e.g., four at a time
   • open format for GIS called "geotiff" for open spatial software
   • animation within the LAS? - desirable yes - any issues of size of files?
   • general users - annual average maps - overlay model output on GoogleEarth - see topography - overlaying socio-economic
   • people being familiar with google earth and use it, becoming the standard and apply climate data and then become more sophisticated over time
   • some sample data to verfy that you have downloaded the data correctly
2. Searching
3. Analysis on live access
4. other
   • shape files for quick look to superimpose on map (river basins)
   • link with ESRI tools
   • user forum to post ideas and users can respond; track responds on the site (mailing list may be another method but )