U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit

The Climate Explorer has offered public-friendly access to climate projections for every county in the contiguous United States for more than five years, and the development team continues work to improve the tool. We're pleased to announce that Climate Explorer Version 3.0 is now available.

Version 3.0 provides direct access to all of the features offered through Climate Explorer.

Major updates: 

• The tool is now mobile-friendly, allowing tablet and smartphone users to check future climate projections for their locations. 

• Navigation has been streamlined. The new version provides direct access to all six of the tool's main features from a single screen, after a user enters a location of interest.

• New maps show projections of annual averages for temperature and precipitation variables, as well as the four monthly averages used to represent each season.

• Maps for all temperature variables now use the same color ramp, so users can directly compare maps of historical and projected conditions across 15 decades.

• Charts showing projections from two climate model runs for a higher emissions scenario (RCP 8.5) are now available for all boroughs in Alaska except Aleutians West.

Additional improvements to the tool are forthcoming. The team is actively working to incorporate projections for the remaining borough in Alaska and to provide documentation of how charts for that state are different from those for the contiguous United States. The team also anticipates including charts for Hawai'i and other U.S. territories in the future, and updating charts and maps so they dynamically display values under the user's cursor, with explanatory text.

For an overview of the features of Climate Explorer, see the rollout announcement of the tool's previous version. 

To provide feedback on Climate Explorer Version 3.0, click “Yes” on the “Want to provide feedback?” button in the lower right of the screen after you've selected a location. You can respond to two brief usability tasks and/or system-usability questions, or provide direct comments to the developers. The team anticipates making a formal rollout of Climate Explorer 3.0 in January 2020.