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This report documents the production of statistically downscaled future climate projections by the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium (PCIC) for Environment Canada under contract number KM170-12-1236. Section 2 describes the selection of a subset of GCM scenarios for the CMIP5 ensemble based on an objective set of selection criteria. The criteria included hemispheric skill assessment based on the CLIMDEX indices (Sillmann et al. 2013) historical criteria used previously at PCIC (Werner 2011), and refinement based on a modified clustering algorithm (Houle et al. 2012; Katsavounidis et al. 1994). In section 3, results are summarized from an intercomparison of three downscaling techniques based on methods used in a previous intercomparison conducted by PCIC (Bürger et al. 2012a).

This Science Brief shares the results of a recent paper in the journal Climatic Change by Sriver and colleagues. In this paper, the authors examine the component of sea level rise due to thermal expansion and determine that the upper bound of physically plausible sea level rise is higher than once thought.