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Dynamical Downscaling over the Great Lakes Basin: Uncertainty in WRF Regional Model Projections of future warming as a Function of Driving General Circulation Model.

In this talk, we will describe the impact upon uncertainty in regional climate change projections due to differences in the global model employed to make the low resolution projection used to drive the regional model. A mini-ensemble of climate change projections has been constructed in which the same version of WRF is employed to downscale the climate change projections produced using output from several of the global models that were exercised in Phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison (CMIP5). In all cases, the global models were run under the IPCC Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 Scenario for greenhouse gas increase. Results from this mini-ensemble are first verified on the basis of instrumental observations for the historical period (1979-1989) and future climate projections are produced for both a period characterized by moderate (2050-2060) and one in which the expected climate change is much more severe (2085-2100). By employing the same WRF configuration in the downscaling process we are able to isolate the contribution to uncertainty across with the individual large scale models.