The central contradiction of climate change is that it is at once the most epic problem that our species has ever faced yet it is largely invisible to the average human. From the comfort of your home, you may not realize how climate change is already affecting mental health, or ripping apart ecosystems, or how cities like Los Angeles are taking drastic measures to prepare for water shortages.

The challenge for scientists, then, is raising the alarm on something that’s hard to conceptualize. But a new interactive map is perhaps one of the best visualizations yet of how climate change will transform America. Click on your city, and the map will pinpoint a modern analog city that matches what your climate may be in 2080. New York city will feel more like today’s Jonesboro, Arkansas; the Bay Area more like LA; and LA more like the very tip of Baja California. If this doesn’t put the dire threat of climate change into perspective for you, I’m not sure what will.

Matt Fitzpatrick/University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

The data behind it isn’t anything new, but the public-friendly repackaging of that data, known as climate-analog mapping, represents a shift in how science reaches the public. “The idea is to translate global forecasts into something that's less remote, less abstract, that's more psychologically local and relevant,” says University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science ecologist Matt Fitzpatrick, lead author on a new paper in Nature Communications describing the system.

Fitzpatrick looked at 540 urban areas in North America using three primary datasets. One captured current climatic conditions (an average of the years between 1960 and 1990), the second contained projections of future climates, and the third provided historic climate variability from year to year taken from NOAA weather records. (Depending on the city, climate might be more "stable," or swing more wildly between years.) The researchers considered temperature and precipitation in particular, though of course these aren’t the only two variables when modeling the climate—more on that in a bit.

Matt Fitzpatrick/University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

If you click around the interactive map, you’ll notice some trends under a scenario where emissions continue to rise for 60 years. “Many East Coast cities are going to become more like locations to the southwest, on average roughly 500 miles away,” says Fitzpatrick. On the West Coast, cities look generally like places straight south of them. Portland, for instance, will in 2080 feel more like California’s Central Valley, which is generally warmer and drier. Also, the map has an option (on its left side) that uses a different calculation to show what the shifts would look like if emissions peak around 2040 and begin to fall.

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The implications are shocking, but also potentially useful. “Framing results in a digestible manner for the public sector, to inform policy, and for the scientific community, is notoriously difficult,” says University of Wisconsin–Madison climate scientist Kevin Burke, who wasn’t involved in the study. “One notable outcome of this work is the potential for cities and their analog pairs to transfer knowledge and coordinate climate adaptation strategies.”