Ascension climate projections

Predicting the impacts of global change at a local scale

Climate change is a global phenomenon, but its impacts will not be uniformly felt and will be shaped by actions taken collectively by the international community over coming decades

In order to fully understand the implications for Ascension’s biodiversity, we must first have access to the best available projections of how the local and regional climate will change under the full spectrum of possible emission scenarios (or  ‘shared socio-economic pathways’).

As part of the CRACAB project, scientists at the University of East Anglia are conducting a painstaking exercise in data archaeology to reconstruct recent changes in Ascension Island’s climate and using state-of-the-art global circulation models to project long-term trends in local air temperature and rainfall.

At the same time, marine ecosystem modellers at Plymouth Marine Laboratory are employing similar techniques to generate Ascension-specific predictions of how oceanographic variables such as water temperature, acidification, oxygenation and primary productivity will change over the next 100 years under “best case” and “worst case” scenarios. Follow the blog series below for updates on the progress of these exciting outputs.

Keep checking the blog for update on how this work package progresses.

NEWS & UPDATES

New Publication!

The long-term temperature and rainfall time series for Ascension Island compiled as part of the CRACAB project was recently published in the...

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