Figure. Ice Concentration distribution in 1950 compared with that estimated for 2010.

BlueBRIDGE has "mapped the future" in a harmonized set of climate forecasts and maps of biotic and abiotic parameters for use in ecological models and climate change-related analyses. The maps are based on data of the AquaMaps Consortium and the NASA Earth Exchange Platform.
 
BlueBRIDGE released 61 maps as NetCDF representations for the years 1950, 1999, 2016, 2050 and 2100 with .5° resolution at global scale. NetCDF is an interoperability-friendly and compact format that can easily be visualised (e.g. QGIS, Unidata ToolsUI, etc).

The maps for Sea Surface Temperature, Sea Bottom Temperature, Sea Surface Salinity, Salinity at Sea Bottom, Ice Concentration, and Primary Production were projected in the future based on the IPCC SRES A2 scenario of rapid economic and global population growth.
 
For annual Average Surface Air Temperature and Precipitations forecasts, 20 general circulation models of NASA were merged for two scenarios;  medium mitigation of greenhouse gasses concentration (RCP 4.5), and high greenhouse gasses concentration (RCP 8.5).
 
The data have already been presented to the “Expert meeting on climate change implications for Mediterranean and Black Sea fisheries”. They are useful in ecological niche models and in the assessment of the effects of habitats shift due to climate change on fisheries. The presentation is available on the repository of the General Fisheries Commission for the Mediterranean Sea. Click here.

 

 

More information is available here.

BlueBRIDGE has recently been engaged in developing distributions of biotic and abiotic parameters to be used in ecological models and climate change-related analyses. Forecasts in distant-time have been extracted from the textual data published by the AquaMaps Consortium and from the NASA Earth Exchange Platform. Through the BlueBRIDGE computational facilities, these data have been collected, cleaned, aligned, and structured in a way that made them directly usable in ecological models.

In particular, NetCDF representation was produced for 61 maps for years 1950, 1999, 2016, and 2050:

  • Six distributions representing Sea Surface Temperature, Sea Bottom Temperature, Sea Surface Salinity, Salinity at Sea Bottom, Ice Concentration, and Primary Production were projected in the future based on the IPCC SRES A2 scenario. The primary sources of these data are The World Ocean Atlas, NOAA NCEP Climatology, SeaAroundUs, VLIZ, and the US National Snow and Ice Data Centres.
  • Forecasted distributions for annual Average Surface Air Temperature and Precipitations were extracted from NASA by merging 20 general circulation models. Scenarios of medium mitigation of greenhouse gasses concentration (RCP 4.5) and of high greenhouse gasses concentration (RCP 8.5) were extracted for these variables.
  • The other variables represent environmental parameters with loose- or no-dependency on time (e.g. depth, Marine Protected Areas, etc.).

The complete datasets are available through the BlueBRIDGE e-Infrastructure, and can be accessed under a number of standards such as the OGC WMS, WCS, OPeNDAP etc.:

http://thredds.d4science.org/thredds/catalog/public/netcdf/ClimateChange/catalog.html

A timeline summarises the distributions of the parameters in the selected years and makes information available as Linked Open Data:

Figure. Timeline of the Climate Change data hosted by BlueBRIDGE: https://dlnarratives.eu/timeline/climate.html

These distributions are also available on the BlueBRIDGE data catalogue  along with several other ecological data sets:

https://bluebridge.d4science.org/group/imarine-gateway/data-catalogue

Animated GIFs depict how the selected environmental parameters change in time:

Auxiliary information, images and other data can be found on the BlueBRIDGE e-Infrastructure at the following public online folder: https://goo.gl/cVKuCb