Nasa hi-res global maps predict future weather across world cities

Nasa scientists have simulated the global climate to project future temperatures and rainfall around the world in high resolution maps that allow regional predictions.

The future hotspot maps with 25 km resolution from the Nasa Earth Exchange (NEX) provide daily high and low temperatures, as well as rainfall, across the world for any day between 2050 and 2100.

Developed using 21 climate models and terabytes of satellite data, the data gives policymakers an idea of how any city fares with regard to drought, floods, heat waves and other extreme weather events.

People can also access the information on Amazon Web Services without downloading the data set.

"This is a fundamental dataset for climate research and assessment with a wide range of applications," Ramakrishna Nemani, NEX project scientist at Ames, said in a statement.

The Nasa Earth Exchange project was set up in 2009 to analyse the massive amounts of data that Nasa collects daily.

"It was a big data project before big data projects became popular," said Tsengdar Lee, high-end computing program manager at Nasa.

Hundreds of terabytes of data collected by satellites and simulated by climate models were crunched by a supercomputer at the Ames Research Center in California.

The supercomputer's algorithm was tuned to recognize differences between the CMIP-5 models and real-world observations to correct the simulations down to 25-km resolution, writes ClimateWire.

The projections are based on the assumption of a business as usual scenario of emissions as well as extreme ones.

Under the extreme one called RCP 8.5 scenario, the July temperature maximums in 2100 across the most densely populated parts of the globe are well above 35 degrees Celsius.

Existing climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, called Coupled Model Intercomparison Project-5 (CMIP-5), have a resolution of 100 to 200 kms and are useful for simulating global changes. Regional scale projections are not possible.