The Climate Wizard is an interactive map that allows users to view the future predictions for temperature and rainfall as well as historic records for any area in the world; available at http://www.climatewizard.org/ The Climate Wizard allows users to specify analysis area, time period, climate model, average temperature or precipitation, and average or change. Analysis area allows users to select either global or specific regions, such as a state, although increased zoom is available. Climate model can also be changed to see different prediction levels; low, medium, high.
The interactive map allows users to visualize what a particular region of the world will look like in 2050 or 2080, hopefully educating users on the changes that can be expected. The Climate Wizard also allows users to look back over the past 50 years to see changes that may have already occurred. Modeling precipitation and average temperature may also help local governments and policy makers take climate into account in decision making.
The Climate Wizard was developed in a collaborative effort by The Nature Conservancy, University of Washington, and the University of Southern Mississippi in 2009. The data for creating the predictions for specific regions of the world was gathered from Oregon State University and a variety of other contributors that model changes in precipitation and temperature. The Wizard uses data and predictions from the IPCC fourth report. Hopefully the Climate Wizard will be updated with the predictions from the IPCC fifth report.
I thought that this was a really cool model. It was very easy to use, and yet very detailed, with several options for type of future development and the type of model used. It did a very god job of showing that even under the best case scenario development plans (for the environment) that temperature will still increase. Therefore, I thought that this model was excellent at showing the immediate and impending need to create policies and action plans right now to help mitigate as much of the future damage to the environment as possible.
This website is really fun to experiment with, especially because of all the visuals. It is nice how all this data is compiled into one place and how there is data available not only from the US but from the world as well. Now knowing about global patterns, its interesting to see where the the highest increases in temperature are. My favorite part about this site is being able to see time-series images of precipitation changes in the US. It is also a great tool to inform the public about climate change and the potential temperature levels that can be reached.
I thought this website was a very useful and informative site. It really can show how much of an impact the world is going to suffer due to our actions as human beings. I did find the site a little confusing though with all of the different scenarios. However, that aside, I think that this could be a useful thing for people to use to show how badly the environment is doing.