Land-use and land-cover changes (LULCC) significantly affect weather and climate as iswell documented in the scientific literature. These impacts include changes in air temperature, precipitation, atmospheric moisture content, energy fluxes, and mesoscale and potentially large-scale circulations. Recently, the United States National Research Council (2005) highlighted the importance of LULCC an...

We present two case studies that demonstrate how a common evaluation methodology can be used to assess the reliability of regional climate model simulations from different fields of research. In Case I, we focused on the agricultural yield loss risk for maize in Northeastern Brazil during a drought linked to an El-Niño event. In Case II, the presentday regional climatic conditions in Europe for...

Analyzing and assessing potential impacts of climate change are critical and challenging tasks that require the processing of large and heterogeneous datasets. These analyses are particularly demanding because of the multi-scale and multi-objective nature of environmental modeling for climate change impact assessment. The Climate Impacts: Global and Regional Adaptation Support Platform (ci:gras...

This paper presents examples of modeling studies carried out at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) where an integration of biophysical and socioeconomic factors in modeling impacts of global environmental was successfully achieved. The first example is taken from an integrated analysis of the impacts of alternative future energy paths on the regional supply and tra...

1) Determine the uncertainty related to the natural variability in the environmental parameters that drive the modular modeling approach of 2D-SedFlux (primitive geological parameters). These include ocean climate and the sediment supply to the ocean margin from land. Of interest is how this variability couples with, or is independent of, model error (numerical, prediction-precision, and accura...

This paper reviews methods that have been used to evaluate global climate simulations and to downscale global climate scenarios for the assessment of climate impacts on hydrologic systems in the Pacific Northwest, USA. The approach described has been developed to facilitate integrated assessment research in support of regional resource management. Global climate model scenarios are evaluated an...