What will climate where you live feel like in 60 years? Over the next few decades, global climate is expected to undergo a dramatic transformation in an ongoing response to greenhouse gas emissions. What do we expect future climate to feel like and how might this change if we reduce emissions? We answer these questions by finding the present-day location that has a climate most similar to that expected by the 2080’s in each of 540 cities (shown as purple dots on the map). We do this for different rates of emissions and a variety of climate models. We used 12 different measures to describe climate, including minimum and maximum temperature and total precipitation for winter, spring, summer and fall. We considered two emissions scenarios – one that assumes high current emissions continue and one that assumes emissions peak mid-century and then decline. We also considered numerous future climate forecasts as generated by 27 different climate models. An interesting, but not necessarily surprising finding is that there are no perfect matches. In other words, for no city did we find a present-day climate that is identical to a city's climate in 2080. In fact, because of the magnitude of expected climate change, for many cities the “best” match is not all that similar. This means that many cities could experience a future climate unlike anything present in North America today, especially if rates of greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced. You can read the details at Nature Communications.

After selecting a city from the list at right or by clicking on one of the cities highlighted with a purple circle on the map: You can map two kinds of information. - A line from a city to the location with the most similar climate. As described in the Background tab, this location will be the best match, but not a perfect match. The size of the circle gives a sense of how good of a match that location is, with larger circles indicating poorer matches. - Or you can add a climate similarity surface to show not just the location of the most similar climate, but also how climate similarity to the selected city varies from place to place. If all locations have low similarity (in other words, all locations are a poor match to that city's future climate), the climate similarity surface will be very small. Los Angeles, CA is a good example where this is the case. You can select one of two emission levels. - Current high emissions - Reduced emissions similar to those that we might expect under the Paris Climate Accord. Lastly, you can select how much detail you want for the line map. - The average of the 27 different climate models (the default) - Or a line for each of the 27 climate models and the average. Note that the choice of viewing all 27 climate models is not available when mapping a climate similarity surface. As for the average line map, the size of the circles give a sense of how good of a match that location is, with larger circles indicating poorer matches.