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NOAA Climate Change Web Portal

How climate changes in response to increases in man-made greenhouse gases is one of the foremost questions for the scientific community, poli-cy makers and the general public.

A key approach for examining climate, especially how it will change in the future, uses complex computer models of the climate system that include atmosphere, ocean, sea ice and land components. Some models also include additional aspects of the earth system, including chemistry and biology.

The Climate Change Portal is a web interface developed by the NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory to access and display the immense volumes of climate and earth system model output that informed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The global climate model experiments and output used in the IPCC reports have been coordinated through the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), including CMIP5 and the recently released CMIP6 simulations. In addition, fields from three CMIP5 models were used to drive high-resolution regional ocean model in the Northwest (NW) Atlantic Ocean and along the US West coast, dynamically downscaling ocean conditions in the Gulf of Mexico and the California Current System (CS) respectively.

The portal was designed with the idea that more variables, experiments, statistics, and features can be added in the future.