Accounting for multiple climate components when estimating climate change exposure and velocity
June 1, 2015
- The effect of anthropogenic climate change on organisms will likely be related to climate change exposure and velocity at local and regional scales. However, common methods to estimate climate change exposure and velocity ignore important components of climate that are known to affect the ecology and evolution of organisms.
- We develop a novel index of climate change (climate overlap) that simultaneously estimates changes in the means, variation and correlation between multiple weather variables. Specifically, we estimate the overlap between multivariate normal probability distributions representing historical and current or projected future climates. We provide methods for estimating the statistical significance of climate overlap values and methods to estimate velocity using climate overlap.
- We show that climates have changed significantly across 80% of the continental United States in the last 32 years and that much of this change is due to changes in the variation and correlation between weather variables (two statistics that are rarely incorporated into climate change studies). We also show that projected future temperatures are predicted to be locally novel (
Citation Information
| Publication Year | 2015 |
|---|---|
| Title | Accounting for multiple climate components when estimating climate change exposure and velocity |
| DOI | 10.1111/2041-210X.12360 |
| Authors | Christopher P. Nadeau, Angela K. Fuller |
| Publication Type | Article |
| Publication Subtype | Journal Article |
| Series Title | Methods in Ecology and Evolution |
| Index ID | 70187293 |
| Record Source | USGS Publications Warehouse |
| USGS Organization | Coop Res Unit Leetown |